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I just had a moment to read, "Hitting Theater Hard: The Loss of Subscribers Who Went to Everything" which was written by Michael Paulson and published in the New York Times. It's a very thoughtful, timely piece.

It's a topic that is front and center in many of the leadership meetings at performing arts organizations across the country as the business model of the live cultural experience has been forever changed. But as I finished reading the article, I noticed there was an equally interesting storyline running in parallel - and that storyline was the feedback in the comments of the article.

At the time I was reading the article, over 500 people had commented. And those comments were heavy, descriptive, and passion-filled. Most commenters self-described as theatre patrons and had deeply held perspectives on what they believe was happening in the world of the performing arts. As I read and scrolled, it was like being in a real-time focus group.

As a marketer, my job is to try and connect the dots in consumer behavior. What insights can we pull to better understand the actions we should take in engaging potential audiences? So with a little ( actually a lot of) copying and pasting of 500 pages of reader comments from the New York Times story, I enlisted the help of an AI-driven LLM (large language model) to summarize an analysis of how readers responded to the story and their perspectives on the future of the subscription model.

As you can imagine, the themes of what the feedback was from readers was quite varied. It was fueled with emotion as will the responses of the folks reading this article - everyone has an opinion on the past, present, and future health of the theatre industry.

So, here's what AI has to say about what it's hearing from patrons who weighed in on the New York Times story. I tend to think it's one of the more emotionless ways to navigate an emotion-driven industry.

1. Preference for New and Challenging Content: Many commenters express a desire for new and innovative plays that challenge their thinking and offer fresh perspectives. They are seeking content that introduces them to the unknown and sparks new ideas.

2. Dissatisfaction with Didactic and Preachy Plays: Several commenters mention their dissatisfaction with plays that come across as didactic or preachy. They prefer works that engage them intellectually and emotionally without feeling like they're being lectured to.

3. Desire for Entertainment and Enjoyment: A common sentiment among commenters is the desire for theatrical experiences that offer entertainment and enjoyment. They seek plays that are not only thought-provoking but also fun and engaging.

4. Preference for Flexibility in Attendance: Many readers express a preference for buying tickets to individual shows rather than committing to subscriptions. They value the flexibility to choose what they want to see and when.

5. Impact of Age and Accessibility: Age-related factors, such as concerns about late showtimes, accessibility, and comfort, play a role in some commenters' decisions to unsubscribe or attend theater less frequently.

6. Connection Between Subscriptions and Donations: Commenters highlight the link between subscriptions and donations, indicating that many donors are also subscribers. This connection emphasizes the importance of retaining both groups for theater funding.

7. Shift in Viewing Habits: The rise of streaming platforms and the convenience of enjoying entertainment at home have impacted theater attendance habits. Some commenters mention that they have developed a preference for at-home viewing.

8. Mixed Feelings About Shakespeare and Classic Plays: Some readers express mixed feelings about classic plays like Shakespearean works. While some appreciate the artistry and skill involved, others find it challenging to connect with the plots and language.

9. Importance of Audience Diversity: Many commenters stress the importance of diversifying theater audiences and programming. They believe that reducing reliance on a homogeneous subscriber base can lead to more inclusive and diverse experiences.

10. Financial Concerns for Theaters: Several readers acknowledge the financial challenges theaters face due to the decline in subscriptions. They are concerned about the impact on the theater industry and its ability to continue producing quality shows.

11. Efforts to Adapt and Engage New Audiences: Some commenters highlight the need for theaters to adapt their strategies to engage new audiences and retain existing ones. This includes exploring flexible subscription models and programming that appeals to a wider demographic.

12. Value of Artistic Risk-Taking: The discussion of risk-taking in theater arises, with some readers emphasizing that the decline in subscriptions could lead to less willingness to take artistic risks, which are essential for creativity and growth.

13. Personal Preferences and Individual Tastes: Many comments reflect individual preferences for specific types of plays, genres, or formats. Readers acknowledge that personal taste plays a significant role in their choices to subscribe or attend shows.

14. Nostalgia and Appreciation for Classics: While some commenters express a desire for new and contemporary works, others appreciate the value of classic plays and their enduring appeal.

15. Theater's Social and Cultural Role: A few comments delve into the broader role of theater in society, discussing its potential to challenge norms, provoke thought, and reflect the world around us.

While this is far from a scientific study or analysis, 500 responses from New York Times readers who are self-identifying as performing arts buyers is nothing to sneeze at. As you read the comments, you can hear their passion scream off the page for an industry they obviously care deeply about.

It was clear well before the pandemic that the traditional subscription model of old simply doesn't match the realities, wants, or needs of the modern performing arts patron. The pandemic put that reality on steroids and we are seeing it in the lack of revenue across organizations.

The question remains -what do we do about it? And while I will continue to spend time and energy sharing my personal opinions, I think it's wise to give space to the opinions of those who have historically bought the tickets.

When I asked the LLM to summarize all 500 pages into just the three themes that rose above all of the rest from the comments in the New York Times story, here is how it said patrons feel:

1. Dissatisfaction with Programming and Content: Many commenters expressed dissatisfaction with the programming and content offered by theaters. They mentioned that some productions were overly didactic, lacked entertainment value, or focused too much on teaching lessons. There was a desire for more fun, diverse, and engaging shows that cater to different tastes and preferences.

2. Flexibility and Variety in Subscriptions: A significant number of commenters highlighted the need for more flexibility in subscription models. They preferred the option to choose individual shows rather than being tied to a full subscription. This theme also touched on the idea of having more options for different types of subscriptions, allowing subscribers to tailor their experiences to their interests.

3. Impact of Age and Changing Preferences: Many commenters discussed how age and changing preferences played a role in their decisions to unsubscribe or attend theater less frequently. Older audience members mentioned factors like late show times, parking concerns, and health issues. Some individuals also mentioned shifting priorities and a preference for alternative forms of entertainment, such as streaming services.

There's a great quote by Gary Hopkins that reads, "Never allow your ego to diminish your ability to listen." I think whatever progress we want to see in the future of the subscription model, our ability to effectively listen will be the key ingredient to any success we hope to have.

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The Future of the Subscription Model in Theatre According to Patrons

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I just had a moment to read, "Hitting Theater Hard: The Loss of Subscribers Who Went to Everything" which was written by Michael Paulson and published in the New York Times. It's a very thoughtful...

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As a 2022-2023 Project Number One artist in residence at Soho Rep, I spent the year in deep reflection on the state of the American non-profit theater and, well, I have some suggestions.

If you put me in charge of a non profit theater tomorrow, here's what I would do.

Work with the board to amend the organizational charter capping executive pay (Artistic Director, ED and director or production) at 1.3 to 1.6 times the salary of the highest paid full time salaried non-executive employee.

Place a hiring freeze on new full time administrative positions until revenues recovered to fiscal '23 levels.

Cut materials budgets for designers. This one stings, but we need to deescalate the production arms race of the 2010s.

Lobby Local Government for funding for artists. We would need 60 times the current National Endowment for the Arts budget to match European levels of theater funding. That isn't happening, especially not as a bailout. I think we stand a much better chance of lobbying local governments to, for example, institute a small tax on ticket sales to fund direct artist grants.

Speaking of which, a busy season for a German theater artist is 3 to 4 productions. Designers and directors should be able to support themselves comfortably doing no more than 6 shows a year.

Dig deep into the inflation reduction act and figure out a way to put the theater on a path towards carbon neutrality by 2030. Partner with local sustainable energy corporations and funds to do this. We can no longer pretend that theater is an exception to the climate crisis.

Create equipment share programs with local schools and non professional theaters.

Pool Production resources with other local theaters. Build centralized shops to split the cost of equipment, and sheet stock etc.

Instead of pulling a dumpster up to the theater after every show DONATE DONATE DONATE. Give away costumes and construction material after every show. Someone will take them.

Cultivate a board culture that embraces the institution's role as vanguards and visionary risk takers. If board members want to fund lobbies instead of operations find new board members.

Place artists and non financial stake holders on the board. Give them real power and meaningful committee assignments.

Raise hourly technician fees such that they have kept up with inflation since 2010. If this is less than 30 an hour raise it to that.

Smaller physical productions will necessarily mean less over hire staff. Encourage department heads to network with local event companies and venues such that skilled technicians can be re directed to other job opportunities.

Engage in total budget transparency with creative teams and give them control of spending. If the artistic team wants to cut the lighting budget to make a series of gorgeous period gowns, let them. If they want to rent nothing and put a stool on stage but pay for everyone in the audience to have a little sculpture, let them.

Create financial bonuses for designers and creative teams that stay on budget. This can come out of the normal 20 percent contingency.

Let creative teams know in writing that if they go over budget they will not be invited back to the theater. Hold them to it.

Commission new work based on local interests. One of Trinity Rep's biggest hits was a bio play about Buddy Cianci. I saw a play in Omaha that a Chicago company made by researching stories of how Black neighborhoods split apart by the interstate highway system. It would never transfer to New York, but the theater had to cut the talkback short after an hour and a half. People couldn't wait to tell their stories and it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. If you make plays that reflect people's lives they will show up.

Program the classics only when a director has a REALLY good idea. Like, really good. People think that old plays are stuffy and boring because the productions have become stuffy and boring. Williams is scandalously erotic. Adrienne Kennedy is still ahead of most modern writers. Treat every classic like a premier.

Operate from an expanded notion of cannon. Chekhov yes. Shakespeare in. So is Williams. But also Wilson. And Kennedy. And Susan Lori Parks and Paula Vogel and and and and

Put artists on staff. Project One at Soho rep yielded the theater's biggest hits post COVID. At big enough orgs you can pay for this through savings in executive compensation. Require that the artists create a work and nothing else. Invite them to participate in the day to day life of the theater. Some works will fail and that's okay. This should make up about 3 percent of your total budget.

Open a bar on site. A good bar. A bar that artists can afford. Hold your opening night parties there. Keep it open after the show. Turn the theater into a place that people feel comfortable hanging out.

Fill that bar every night of the week with artists making art. Invite in drag kings and queens. Curate performance salons. Readings of new plays. Bands. Stand ups. Burlesque artists. But also, performances by well known cast members on their nights off. More than anything young artists need community. Cap ticket prices at something they can afford. Maybe 20 bucks. Sometimes the noise rock show might disturb that really nice silent moment in act III but I honestly don't know what to tell you. Embrace a bit of mess.

Create a clear pipeline for artists to make it from the bar/cabaret space to the MainStage. Take coffee meetings with literally everyone who asks. Be totally transparent about how show selection works.

Similarly, list creative jobs. We have to have a way to find creative teams other than through the country club MFA programs.

Pay playwrights more. They are the most underpaid class of theater maker. You can't eat social prestige. Again this may have to come at the expense of physical production of even marketing that's okay.

Have an AD for continuity but hire a guest curator every season. They can maybe split the season in some ratio like 2 to 1. Appoint a committee of local artists to choose guest curators. Friction and challenge is a good thing.

Work towards parity of all kinds by initiating executive training programs. Instead of tokenizing people and setting them up to fail, create guard rails around their success.

Put a social worker on retainer. As we diversify our spaces conflict is bound to arise. Mediators are necessary. Also, theater artists have often put off years of health care and that includes mental health care. Far too often it falls on administrators who aren't qualified to intervene when mental health flare up happens. Just hire a professional. It's better for the person who needs help and better for the sustainability of the organization.

Reimagine the potential of our buildings. Be like Jack, Abrons, and Target Margin during the early pandemic when they turned their spaces into food banks. Look to community need and address it.

Program debates, lectures, and public readings on dark weeks. Turn the theater itself into a space of civic engagement.

In short, restore the American non profit theater as a third space. Build a community of artists and thinkers first and then also put on plays.

Curate diverse artists (both in terms of identity and formal approach) and then treat every marketing push as a bespoke project. Bring in people who have maybe never been to a theater and then stay in relationship with them. Invite them to everything! Build a brand around exploration and discovery.

Recognize that every audience brings it's own culture. Listen, for example, to the Lesbian playwright who says that dykes won't buy tickets in advance, or the trans lighting designer when they say that a tight 90 from a drag house means, in fact, 4 and a half hours. Train the house staff to recognize this. Some shows are built for quiet contemplation and some for raucous engagement. Let people know what to expect!

Start 'em young. Get back into schools and start students engaging with real adult fare. I saw Ragtime on Broadway when I was 13 and it changed/ruined my life. And for fucks sake give the kids good seats.

Keep ticket prices where they are. In fact, fuck it, CUT ticket prices. The old audience is gone. If you're gonna start from scratch you may as well get them in the seats with a bargain.

It's okay to have a tent pole production. If your community supports a Christmas Carol or a big musical every year then by all means go for it. At the same time, use those big tent moments to advance the form as best you can. A spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down.

Audiences are smart. Soooooooooooooooo fucking smart. Give them something courageous, well made, and deeply considered and they will follow you a lot farther than you think they will.

Disinvite the critics. They can buy their own tickets.

DON'T CUT SHOWS FROM THE SEASON. Pare them back if you must, but the last thing any of us need is another empty building.

Encourage the artistic practices of administrative staff. Administrators who are themselves artists do a better job. If your education director needs two weeks off to tour their folk punk band, let them.

Set a term limit of ten years on executive leadership. Lead by example.

Embrace technology. It's not a bad thing. Some conservative audience members won't get it but that's okay. There'll be a great production of Piano Lesson for them any day now.

Look places other than New York for new scripts.

Build relationships with international artists. Bring companies like Ontroerend Goed or Theater Free Belarus or Nature Theater of Oklahoma in for residencies and sit down runs of touring productions. Keep abreast of the latest global trends in making and make sure the community of artists understands them as well.

As a trans-feminist, I don't buy into the myth of individual accomplishment. Some of these ideas are cribbed directly from Soho Rep's practices. One comes from my old and dear friend Aaron Profumo as well as comments from an earlier Facebook post. Others are inspired by the work of my project one cohort Hahnji Jang, and their ongoing sustainable fashion project Transcendant Punk. I'd especially like to shout out my dear friend and closest collaborator Peter Mills Weiss with whom I have spent many late nights talking through these ideas. Many of these are ideas that I have already seen successfully implemented around the world! I share this list not as a comprehensive set of solutions, but as a jumping off point for conversation. We're in an absolute crisis as a field, and I believe strongly that we won't be able to move forward until we start talking concrete details of how we want our theaters to operate.

I love you fellow theater freaks! Let's fix this mess :)

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COMPOUNDING CRISES: SNAPSHOT SURVEY 2023 - Presentation

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Check out this Presentation designed by Corinna Schulenburg.

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For the past several months, we've been conducting an informal survey about how playwrights, directors, actors, producers, designers, managing/artistic directors, multi-hyphenates, etc. are doing these days.

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Theatre board member? Join TCG's Trustee Leadership Network

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Theatre board member? Join TCG's Trustee Leadership Network

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Trustees play a crucial role in organizational governance and the future of the not-for-profit theatre field, and TCG recognizes the need for trustee education and engagement. As part of our vision to build a better world for theatre, and a better world because of theatre, TCG has created the Trustee Leadership Network-an enhanced form of individual membership designed for trustees of TCG member theatres.

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The last time American theatres faced a crisis of contraction anything like the one they're facing now-with significant layoffs at New York City's Public Theater and Dallas Theater Center, season "pauses" at L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum and Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre Company, emergency fundraising at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Westport Country Playhouse, not to mention a cascade of closures ( detailed below)-it was in the midst of the Great Recession that began in 2008. A previous dip was felt after the 9/11 attacks, particularly in New York City. Before that, in the early 1990s, a downturn in theatre activity was linked not only to economic recession but to the retreat of federal arts funding in the face of sustained political attack.

Now, despite some puzzling economic signals and real inflationary pressures, and despite our ongoing commitment to Ukraine's defense, the U.S. is decidedly neither in a recession nor a war. So why has our theatre field contracted so precipitously in the past few months, with casualties recorded at every kind of theatre-children's companies, experimental storefronts, LORT powerhouses, midsize performing arts centers, destination theatres-while at the same time many theatres, and not just on Broadway, continue to post encouraging box-office numbers and seem to be carrying on more or less as before? Is it all down to the rocky recovery of live audiences after COVID closures? To programming that audiences are rejecting or indifferent to? To inherent problems in the nonprofit business model, or faulty management practices? To drops in donated income from governments, foundations, corporations, and individual donors?

These aren't just academic questions, of course, but practical and existential ones for theatres pondering anew not only how to make theatre but who they're making it for and why. The full answers to these questions will be as complicated and various as the nation's theatres. But a few generalizations can be ventured. First, it is clear that the contraction we're seeing now actually started last summer-or, more precisely, it could be said that last year's return to full, post-reopening programming after two years of closure was not in fact full at all. Based on our own data, gathered for last fall's season listings, TCG member theatres programmed about 40 percent fewer shows in 2022-23 than they had in the 2019-20 season. A new chart from a study by JCA, an arts marketing firm, shows this disparity starkly. While ticket revenue and audience capacity has bounced nearly fully back for the shows on offer, the inventory of shows and performances is down by almost exactly the same number we recorded last fall:

A field that is putting that much less work onstage-and we have reason to believe that the number of shows slated for the 2023-24 season is unlikely to be much bigger, and may possibly be even smaller-is by definition a shrinking field. And so a lot of the contraction we're seeing is a kind of brutal right-sizing, resulting in layoffs, cancellations, and closures that will have recessionary ripple effects on local economies everywhere from Ashland, Ore., to Brooklyn, not to mention giving a brimming national talent pool fewer entry points.

But if theatres are responding rationally to a drop in demand with a commensurate drop in supply, that doesn't answer the question of why audience demand fell off a cliff. Zannie Voss, who as director of SMU DataArts studies audience trends, told me that a key difference between this crisis and the Great Recession of the late 2000s is that then, "People were still going about their daily lives and holding on to most of their habits, even if they didn't have as much cash to spend. The pandemic was a hard stop button on life. And over the course of two years, people changed their habits, their behaviors, their preferences, and the way they consume arts and culture. It's a shift in consumer behavior."

Jill Robinson at TRG Arts, an arts analysis and consultancy firm, broadly concurred.

"What's different from the Great Recession is that, in that case, ticket buying came back pretty quickly, though philanthropy was hit really hard at that time," said Robinson, whose recent data also show that donations to theatres are down by as much as 40 percent this past spring from pre-pandemic levels. Though Robinson said she was reluctant to generalize about what was making the difference between struggling and thriving theatres, she ventured that too many theatres "allowed the engine to stall" during the COVID shutdown, meaning their engagement with subscribers, donors, and community partners. "If you think about databases as a revenue engine, the longer we let those stale out, the harder it's going to be to reignite it. And theatres let that stale out, in the macro view, longer than other genres did."

It's definitely true that live music revenues surged back stronger than ever (and pointedly, earlier than theatres reopened), even as streaming options made staying home all the more appealing. While the appeal of couch-surfing Netflix et al. over leaving home has been reiterated ad nauseam, Alan Brown of WolfBrown, an arts research and planning consultancy for nonprofits, put a finer point on it.

"When you think of all the popular, excellent drama on television, that is potentially sating public interest in drama," said Brown. "So the real question is, if you define yourself as being about buying tickets and sitting down and shutting up and watching live drama-it's just not mapping to the ideal experience of what younger people want to do in their precious entertainment time."

Most of these researchers and consultants corroborated what we've been hearing anecdotally for the past year: that when audiences do consider going to the theatre, by and large they are craving fun, diversion, celebration, spectacle-uniquely theatrical material they can't get easily at home. Of course, these criteria can mean many different things to different theatregoers. So in the next section we'll drill down on the highly contested question of what role programming is playing in theatres' relative success or failure. Next we'll consider the state of fundraising, particularly at theatres doing it on an emergency, "save our theatre" footing. Then we'll look at whether the entire nonprofit business model needs an overhaul, and if so, what the alternatives are.

And we'll close with a forward-looking note, because as difficult as this moment is for specific theatres and theatre workers, live theatre as an art form is not in danger of disappearing from the face of the earth, as theatres all over the country are proving every night (and afternoon). Figuring out what forms this shape-shifting practice will take next-and who will get to make and enjoy it-has always been the work of this magazine, and will continue to be as long as folks gather in person to entertain each other.

Get With the Program

In conversations in recent months with theatre leaders, we've heard a few consistent refrains about how the 2022-23 season played out. The most common takeaway: Holiday shows killed at the box office last December. We repeatedly heard phrases like "highest-grossing in the theatre's history." This confirms not only the general sense that audiences are mostly craving comfort and joy, but also the grim reality that last winter was the first in three years that didn't see a COVID surge.

We also heard about some other bright spots: that familiar titles like Clue did well at the box office (not for nothing was it one of last season's most-produced plays), but also that some newer plays caught on with audiences via word of mouth. The leaders of Atlanta's Alliance Theatre recently hailed their successful A Christmas Carol but also told us that Katori Hall's Pulitzer-winning The Hot Wing King was a box-office hit in February. The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis reported a similar pattern with their Christmas Carol and their February show, Dominique Morisseau's Confederates.

Arena Stage's Molly Smith said in a recent interview that the highs and lows of the past year have been "extreme. It's either a boffo hit, with tons and tons of people, or it's small audiences. You have something like Ride the Cyclone that just did gangbusters, and extended by a couple of weeks; American Prophet did the same. And then there were two other shows that were good shows-but they weren't events. That seems to be the thing that's drawing people out of their pajamas right now."

It's not as if experimental work isn't thriving in the right environment: At New York City's Soho Rep, their spring show Public Obscenities, a new multilingual play by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, extended several times and had standby lines down the street every night (and recently announced presentations at D.C.'s Woolly Mammoth and Brooklyn's Theatre for a New Audience). That may be why recently departed Soho Rep artistic director Sarah Benson could confidently claim, in a New York Times exit interview, "People want to see ambitious work and things they haven't seen before. They want to be challenged."

One strain of criticism you'll hear from some audience members and critics about the current crisis is that too many theatres have prioritized racial diversity in their programming in recent years, and so theatre's predominantly white audiences are voting with their feet because they don't want to go to the theatre to be "lectured" about injustice (bad news for Brecht, Ibsen, Boal, Odets, or Miller, but that may be an argument for another day). Leaving aside that this critique has little to say about the raft of shuttered theatres compiled at the end of this piece (was Bay Area Children's Theatre's programming too "woke"?), it is true that some theatres may have moved into this work a bit ham-handedly. As SMU's Zannie Voss put it, "The whole racial justice movement of the past few years brought a hard light to the fact that there hasn't been enough diverse programming over the past decade. So you can say, 'Okay, all of a sudden, we're going to do diverse programming,' and hope to just add water and everyone will come. But it's like a friendship-it takes time and trust."

At the Bay Area's California Shakespeare Theatre, which opted to pause productions in 2023 but has several ambitious recovery plans in the works (detailed in the next section), executive director Clive Worsley did concede that "some legacy diehard Shakespeare audience members weren't willing to come along for the ride to a more diverse casting and/or politically relevant or perhaps even politically charged adaptations." But he affirmed the theatre's commitment to diverse programming on pragmatic terms as much as principled ones. "I think that there will always be some relevance for Shakespeare," he said, "but not enough in and of itself to float an organization of this size."

Where's the Money

Almost by definition, nonprofit theatres rely to varying degrees on donated income, even in the best of times. During the COVID shutdown, they received generous relief funding even as their expenses were down, as they weren't producing. According to TCG's Budgeting for Uncertainty: Snapshot Survey 2022, 97 percent of responding theatres applied for and received at least one form of federal relief funds from initiatives such as the Paycheck Protection Program, Employee Retention Tax Credits, CARES Act, Shuttered Venue Operators Grants, American Rescue Plan, and Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program. It is worth noting that some of these programs restricted the use of funds to operations expenses. Also worth noting: Theatres saw a 46 percent drop in expenses from 2017 to 2021, and "positive bottom lines were heavily influenced by contributed and investment revenue, with strong increases in government support," according to TCG's 2021 Theatre Facts Report. During this time, non-trustee individuals and foundations were the largest sources of contributed revenue, nearly equivalent to state, federal, and local funding combined.

A comparison to the aftermath of the 2009 recession is instructive: The 2009 Theatre Facts report indicated a 9.7 percent growth in expenses from 2005 to 2009, while theatres saw significant capital losses from endowments and other investments. Though contributed income was at a five-year high in 2009, it did not provide enough of a boost to offset the decline in earned income and growth in expenses. 60 percent of theatres averaged negative profits in 2009.

That was, in short, a more conventional downturn, from which most theatres eventually recovered. By contrast, the COVID shutdown, with its combination of relief funding and drastically reduced programming, was more like the calm before a brewing storm. In the past year, theatres have ramped up production, now subject to new inflationary and labor challenges, just as relief funds have run out and audiences' preferences have changed. In this context, it's not hard to understand the financial pressures that have caused many theatres to close, pause, or in some cases, run emergency "save our stages" campaigns.

Among them are OSF's $7.3 million "The Show Must Go On" effort, launched on the heels of its last artistic director's departure and now running concurrently with the current five-show season, or the Mark Taper Forum's full stop to raise funds for a 2024-25 season. Connecticut's Westport Country Playhouse is currently in the process of a $2 million fundraising campaign, while also preparing for a leadership transition as Mark Shanahan succeeds Mark Lamos as artistic director next March. Like many theatres around the U.S., the company has had to lay off staff and pare down its programming calendar.

As of last week, Westport told us they were approximately 20 percent of the way toward accomplishing their fundraising goal, with major gifts conversations underway that could push the needle in a positive direction. Still, interim managing director Gretchen Wright admitted, "We might not even get through the next three weeks. We have no cash reserves. We basically have a fixed amount of money in the bank that's just getting smaller and smaller. Unless some of these major gifts come through, we will reach a point of maybe needing to pause operation. We're kind of at a critical, short-term crisis, with some optimism in the longer-term view. Things look brighter going into 2024, but right now-we might run out of money in a couple of weeks."

In the meantime, Westport is committed to broadening the playhouse's offerings beyond traditional live theatre productions, including readings and one-night only shows like comedy, conversations, and concerts.

"It's a financial decision, but also the board is shifting the identity of the organization and the model to be more of a hybrid presenting and producing model," said Wright. "So there's a better balance of revenue and expense, as far as how we're using our space and what we're putting onstage. The pandemic kind of exacerbated the realities, but we had declining audiences for several years prior to 2020. There was a need for some new ways of programming here. We kind of had to hit rock bottom in order to realize that we had to completely change how we do what we do."

Westport surveyed its audiences, asking what would bring them back to the theatre. "Instead of seeking buy-in from them, we've heard what they want, and so now we're adjusting accordingly," said Wright. "We're trying to give our community what they want, because we feel that's the only thing that's getting the theatre going in the short term."

Still, she explained that even with a more efficient model, fundraising has been a challenge.

"We had a big drop-off in corporate support that started in 2020," she said. "It's been a struggle to bring that back up. Other institutional support for us was typically tied to programming. The more programming we've cut, the harder it's been to get funding from those organizations. I feel that many of them were happy to convert a grant to general operating during the pandemic, but I think that trend is changing. They want money to go to programs, and they're kind of tired of converting it for canceled programming."

In collaboration with six other regional theatres in Connecticut, Westport was able to lobby the state government for some small additional grants. The playhouse is also still waiting to receive an employee-retention credit, but that is expected to be the last of the relief funding. At this point, Westport's future hangs in the balance.

Another company in regrouping mode is the California Shakespeare Theater, which opted to suspend in-house productions in 2023. But the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater won't be dark for long. When managing director Sarah Williams stepped down in fall 2022, the company seriously considered closure. Then former director of artistic learning Clive Worsley returned to become executive director and offered the theatre another option, based on work that was already happening.

"In 2021, we produced one production of our own, and in 2022, we produced two productions of our own," explained Worsley, "and the rest of the calendar was opened up to other groups to come and perform under what was called a Shared Light Initiative, where other performing arts organizations in and around the Bay Area were invited to produce their work on our stage for little or no fee."

Worsley cited theatre companies in the Bay Area that are keeping costs down by sharing patron services, software, IT personnel, and activities. The Cal Shakes scene shop is building sets for Berkeley Playhouse, Shotgun Players, American Conservatory Theater, and other theatre companies. This arrangement not only saves those companies money; it's also generating revenue that will make it possible for Cal Shakes to produce a marquee production for its 50th anniversary in 2024.

"The idea is that we become a multidisciplinary performing arts venue," said Worsley, "with Cal Shakes as the resident theatre company at the center of it. Our education programs will continue as before. We will make the space available to other performing arts groups to share the space with their audience, and merge our audiences, and we will also do straight-up revenue-positive rental activities."

As for the theatre's fundraising approach, Worsley said, "It's almost as though what we are right now is a startup, and we are actively going out and looking for capital for this startup."

This crisis, unfortunately, intersects with larger changes in arts funding patterns. A study by the Arts Funders Forum showed changes in giving behaviors with a "rising generation of donors." As Forum director Melissa Cowley Wolf put it in a 2020 op-ed, these donors are increasingly "skeptical about the power of the arts to create a better world. Research shows that many of these funders prioritize advancing social, racial, environmental justice and equity; they seek specific, measurable impact; and they embrace technology to solve the pressing issues of our day."

To recapture these donors, Wolf recommends that arts organizations change the conversation around fundraising to reflect their specific core values, and to take a more active, mission-oriented approach to addressing structural inequities in the field.

This generational shift comes as the nonprofit sector struggles to contend with an overall reduction in donors. Donor participation fell in five out of the last six quarters, particularly among new donors, with a 10 percent decline recorded in 2022, according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project's Q4 report. This has caused a reliance on large donations from repeat donors. Calls for renewed federal funding, even a bailout for the theatre industry, have also been heard, though it is hard to imagine the current U.S. Congress considering this seriously.

Surveying this aspect of the crisis, TRG's Jill Robinson said, "It's a long game. It's expensive to create new customers for any business, and we have to create funders who are interested in helping make that happen." Considering CTG's decision to pause production at the Mark Taper Forum for a full season and raise money, she said, "I can't even imagine how hard that is in this environment. To say, 'Listen, we need to take a beat-we're committed, but we've got to have the financial plans to be able to do this kind of work.' I think that's an inspiration, not a failure. This political environment is becoming more open to having the real conversation right now about, what is it going to take to keep the doors open? It takes courageous leaders who say, 'We've got to have financial plans for the next five or 10 years, not for the next 60 days.'"

This Year's Model

Of course, an effort to bail out theatres as they've run for decades side-steps the larger question of whether the nonprofit business model itself is sustainable or in need of a root-and-branch overhaul. When Mara Isaacs left the nonprofit sector to found Octopus Theatricals 10 years ago, it was in no small part because, as she said in a recent interview, "The writing was on the wall" for the business model undergirding the nation's nonprofit theatres. The structure around how theatre does business, how it funds its work, how it connects to its community, and how it is valued in the larger society simply hasn't evolved or developed at the same pace as the industries around it.

"I think the business model is severely broken, and it hasn't changed much in the last 75 years," echoed Michael Bobbitt, who also left theatre leadership behind him to serve as executive director for Mass Cultural Council. "There are many strained business models out there, but theatres might be the most strained of my arts organizations."

Bobbitt said moving to a state agency has helped give him a broader perspective of the issues facing theatre since his days in the thick of things (he formerly served as artistic director of the New Repertory Theatre in Watertown, Mass., and of Adventure Theatre-MTC in Maryland). As he considered the issues facing theatre's business model, he pointed to a conundrum that has challenged organizations from Wiliamstown Theatre Festival to the storefront theatres of Chicago: In the last few years, the industry has pushed for overdue corrections around racial equity, labor, artist treatment, and hiring practices. "All of that added expenses and none of it brought in more revenue," he said. "So we put more pressure on our theatre companies, more strain on the business."

To be fair, Bobbitt noted that the nonprofit arts sector across the board is financially unstable-this isn't just a theatre problem. That's why, when he looks for solutions and alternatives to the way theatre does business, his eyes turn toward industries outside the sector. Bobbitt said that when he was leading arts organizations, he wouldn't look to other arts organizations when trying to find remedies to declining subscription numbers. Instead he would eye patron loyalty programs at hotels or airlines, ice cream parlors or coffee shops, zoos or aquariums, to see what he might learn.

In another example, he pointed to the corporate world and wondered if theatres could be more nimble, stepping away from annual budgeting and focusing on a quarterly budget so that annual planning could potentially be more of a roadmap than a requirement.

"We're asking our artistic directors to program seasons that are six months to 18 months in the future," Bobbitt said. "It doesn't leave any room for flexibility. It doesn't leave us any room to respond to what's happening in the world. The world is moving way too fast for us to do that kind of programming."

He pointed to his own past frustrations directing or choreographing a show late in a theatre's season, worried that a rough first half of the season might result in a theatre's board pushing to cut expenses, thus threatening the quality of the late-season work. Of course, Bobbitt acknowledged that this temporal shift in thinking would bring its own complications, especially when it comes to securing artists, but he wonders if it might also open the door to a more sustainable way to do theatre. Such a move, Bobbitt ventured, might also open the door for nonprofits to follow a successful habit of the for-profit theatre world-i.e., letting a successful show keep chugging along without the theatre being beholden to their subscription promises.

For her part, Isaacs said she wouldn't want to see nonprofits follow too closely in the footsteps of commercial theatre, or to scale back to the point of hyper-focusing on the box-office success or failure of one show after another. She said she can already feel "a real risk aversion now in institutions, because there is so much at stake." This is happening at a time when Isaacs said she's seeing more and more audiences wanting to curate their own experience; they are increasingly looking for some kind of "guarantee of experience" rather than risk or experimentation. It's an impulse that can feel antithetical to offering the public a well-curated, year-long vision of a sole artistic director-another model whose time may have passed.

With ticket prices that have historically priced people out, and COVID-era forays into streaming or virtual theatre offerings that were all too quickly abandoned, nonprofits still struggle to reach audiences.

"The pandemic has been an accelerant, but it is not the cause," Isaacs said. "For whatever reason, our society at large doesn't value what the arts can do for its communities in the way that I think it used to."

League of Chicago Theatres executive director Marissa Lynn Ford said the importance of theatre to the community "needs to be reiterated over and over again." She pointed to theatres impacting the world around them beyond the shows that wind up onstage, be that through educational and other community-centered programming or offerings like training courses for businesses.

As part of her own research, Isaacs has begun looking into the history and reasoning behind 501(c)(3) and why the system is set up the way it is. While she wasn't quite ready to share her findings, she did point to the role of nonprofit boards. With financial pressures mounting on theatres, boards have become fundraising boards, she observed, rather than the ideal she envisions: a group who is there to protect the mission of the organization, a mission that should be intrinsically tied to the theatre's community.

"I think that we're actually at the dawn of a major crisis," Bobbitt said. "These theatres that have closed or ceased programming, that's the beginning. If we don't act now, and we don't act collectively..."

Bobbitt cut himself off. In 2021, for this publication, Bobbitt wrote about the problem with nonprofit boards, laying out not just the issues with them but potential solutions or approaches for the future. Originally he thought only a handful of folks would read it, but, reflecting more recently, he couldn't believe how massive the response was as the field reckoned with his thoughts.

"Yet we haven't done much about it," Bobbitt conceded.

That seems to be how it goes. Changes, as even Bobbitt observed, have been happening via small conversations, which have led to some theatres tinkering at the margins. But widespread action remains elusive. Even, or perhaps especially, at a time of risk aversion, there's value in those risk takers, Isaacs said. There need to be some theatres who try something new, who may become the inspiration other theatres around the country may need-or the cautionary tale that leads others to make improvement.

"One of the challenges is that the people who are actually in action don't have time to do blog posts," Isaacs said. "Maybe the people you want to hear from are not the people who are raising their hand to speak, because they're actually in the trenches trying to figure it out."

So what is the venue for these conversations, and how can those learnings be turned into action on a large scale?

"We need collective impact work," Bobbitt said. "We need to get together as a sector and hash this out, but we need to hash it out with other people-economists and futurists and entrepreneurs and people that really think about building businesses that are sustainable, who spend all their time working on this kind of stuff. We haven't figured it out in our sector. We've been tweaking and tweaking and tweaking but having the same result. Now we're seeing theatres closing. We need to ask for help."

Light a Candle

As we've been compiling this feature and the listing of closed companies and programs below, season listings have been pouring in for the 2023-24 at TCG member theatres. If you're looking for an antidote to despair about the state of the field, you could do worse than take a look through these listings -still in progress as of this writing, but growing in size and scope every day. They paint an incomplete but encouraging picture of a field that is home to a mix of ambition and tradition, new and old, familiar and fantastical.

One particular bright spot we've noticed: multigenerational and TYA programming. These are worth doing for their own sake, of course, but they also promise long-tail impact. As Peter Brosius, outgoing artistic director of Minneapolis's Children's Theatre Company, told us recently, "People are hungry to provide opportunities for their kids, so our education programs are going gangbusters-they're selling out faster than ever." And he made a familiar point with fresh urgency, looking out at a struggling field and noting "the number of regionals who are beginning to make multigenerational programming a part of their life, because they realize that the single best way to build the audience of the future is to start people when they're young. It's not gambling. It's bloody simple. All the studies show that people who have been exposed to the arts and had deep arts experiences when they're young are so much more likely to engage the arts as audiences, as practitioners, as donors, as patrons, as board members, as staff, than those who haven't. So we literally see our work not so much as making plays but as sort of guaranteeing a future for the American theatre."

Indeed, for all the challenges of the present moment, one pressing question for the future is the extent to which theatres are expanding and nourishing audiences and creative talents of tomorrow. A few signal examples can provide an inspiration and a model. At Chicago Children's Theatre (CCT), the Red Kite Project houses numerous programs for kids with autism, developmental disabilities, and other accessibility needs, as well as for their families. Founded by CCT artistic director Jacqueline Russell, Red Kite is not an afterthought or add-on but is central to CCT's very founding and mission-"the heart of the company," as Russell put it.

While many theatres struggle to retain and serve existing audiences, Russell said she spends much of her energy "really trying to convince people that they are welcome here, and we want you here, and there is something for you here. I think there's a big hesitation from a lot of families that their kid will be too much...We're seeing families that would like to participate but don't know if they can."

Red Kite, which remained busy reaching kids both in Chicago and all over the country during the shutdown, has had no shortage of support for their work as they've returned to in-person performance, including funding that has enabled Sam Mauceri, CCT's current director of education and access programs, to manage the Red Kite Project full-time. With initiatives like a three-week summer Camp Red Kite, weekly after-school classes, and multi-sensory interactive performances that go to parks, libraries and community centers, they have watched kids grow into adults in their programs, even experience true belonging for the first time.

Russell shared, "When we did our first Red Kite performance, we mailed invitations to all the kids in our classroom, and we invited them to come to this performance, and they were the very first audience to see it. This mother came up to me, and she said, 'My son is 9 and this is the first invitation he's ever received-to do anything.' It was so meaningful for them to receive an invitation with his name on it. I never forget that, and I am just very proud of this work because I think every child should get that feeling. And we're just gonna keep doing that till we get all those kids to come and party with us in this city."

Meanwhile, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Kelsey Mesa, manager of Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) and Theater Education, said she has "a lot of faith in the future of theatre in the United States, because this next generation of creatives coming up is something special." Indeed, it may be little known that the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival is the prestigious center's oldest program, predating even its impressive building.

The festival serves eight U.S. regions with around 600 colleges and universities, assembling a cohort of young designers and directors, as well as Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship candidates, for professional development opportunities. Having worked at Kennedy Center for 15 years, Mesa has come across plenty of trailblazers. She cites Austin Dean Ashford, an artist known widely for his work as a musician, writer, and performer who experiments with different mediums; current theatre management MFA candidate Roman Sanchez, an alum through Aspire Arts Leadership, who founded Lime Arts in 2016; and Sis Thee Doll, a powerhouse performer and activist who went from being a KCACTF directing fellow to starring in the recent Oklahoma! Tour as Ado Annie and leading the Trans March on Broadway in 2021. Mesa said, "I have learned from Sis that she puts a lot of energy into activism because she needs to make space for herself in the theatre. We do not have a theatre landscape that has space for everyone. There are people who are not automatically included. It can be hard for people to put so much energy into fighting to just be there when they could be making art."

Reflecting on the current moment of crisis, Mesa said, "It's a crumbling of the institution, and it hurts, if you have hung your hat on the institution. It might be seismic. But theatre is not buildings. Theatre is the people, and the people are still gonna be here. So when I think about the challenges, I also think that we can play the long game. We can invest in the next generation in whatever little ways we can. We can advocate for arts education in our schools, and we can support education and outreach programs at theatres. By prioritizing those things, I think the future will be brighter."

As we began this piece with a chart from the JCA arts marketing firm, we will close with another, showing that more than half of audiences who've come back to theatres in the past year are new to the theatre:

Half of an already reduced number of theatregoers is obviously not yet cause for rejoicing. But it's something to build on.

At Arkansas's TheatreSquared, managing director Martin Miller presided over a pandemic-era theatre success story, building a new facility and getting national attention with a live simulcast of Designing Women and a co-production of the online play Russian Troll Farm (which garnered the first Obie Award for an Arkansas theatre). But as Miller transitions to the same title at Princeton's McCarter Theatre Center, the state of the field is much on his mind. He contrasted the current theatre crisis with so many of the rolling disasters we face today, which can make us feel relatively powerless.

"How do we get the bees back? Or what's going on with wildfires in Canada? You can't personally go up there and put out the fire," Miller said. "But when it comes to the crisis in theatre, the solution is in everybody's hands. I'm not trying to take the responsibility for that solution out of the province of the people making theatre, but people who love it and want to give companies the space to figure out what this next chapter is should drop off a check at their local theatre company, even if they didn't love the last show. And then they should go and see a play, and then go and see another one."

Closures Since March 2020
The following list does not include the many theatres that have reduced, cut back, relocated, or paused operations, most of which (but ) are covered in the story above. Berwyn, Ill., 2007-2022
16th Street Theater

Who they were: The only professional theatre in Berwyn, and a program of the North Berwyn Park District, 16th Street operated with a budget of over $200,000 pre-pandemic and performed mainly out of a 49-seat basement theatre space in the North Berwyn Cultural Center.

Reason for closure: The company did not immediately give a reason for the company's closure, which came just over a year after founding artistic director Ann Filmer left the company. In a statement, the 16th Street board said, "We are no longer a program of, or in any way associated with, the North Berwyn Park District. The North Berwyn Park District is the sole owner of the name '16th Street Theater,' and plans to create a children's theatre with that name at some point in the future." Prior to the company's closure, the theatre had been working with the Park District on a move to a former Veterans of Foreign Wars post, which Filmer had previously said was purchased for the company by the Park District. In an interview with the Tribune, interim artistic director Jean Gottlieb said, "The Park District now wants to go in a different direction."
Charlotte, N.C., 1989-2022
Actor's Theatre of Charlotte

Who they were: Founded in 1989, Actor's Theatre of Charlotte's mission was to produce new works by contemporary playwrights. The company's original uptown location was demolished in 2016 to make way for an apartment building. ATC found a new home at Queen's University, but the venue was unavailable for the 2022-23 season. Its budget as of that year was around $795,000.

Kind of work they did: ATC presented revivals and new works confronting major issues facing the city of Charlotte, including gentrification, class mobility, and race. Notable productions included Fun Home and Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill. ATC complemented its tougher works with crowd-pleasers like Rock of Ages and Silence! The Musical.

Reason for closure: In a letter to subscribers, executive director Laura Rice cited "the continuing effects COVID-19 has had on performing arts operations such as ATC, disappointing ticket and subscription sales, and recent news that ATC would be seeking another performance venue." Challenges in finding a new venue in Charlotte, where development is increasingly focused on business over venue spaces, proved the last straw for an already strained organization.
Chicago, 2008-2023
AstonRep Theatre Company

Who they were: Over the years, AstonRep performed at various venues around Chicago, including the Edge Theatre's 104-seat proscenium theatre and black box theatre, and Raven Theatre's 56-seat Schwartz Stage, among other small rental venues.

Reason for closure: When AstonRep announced its 2022-23 season, it presented this 15th season of producing theatre in the city as its last. In a recent interview, founder Robert Tobin said, "The last two, three years have become very tough for a number of factors," including becoming more difficult to raise money. Though running a storefront in Chicago, especially over the last few years, was challenging, Tobin said it was also rewarding. Ultimately, Tobin said, "We just decided 15 years was a good number, and maybe it was time to move on."
Atlanta, 1980-2023
Atlanta Lyric Theatre

Who they were: Founded in 1980 as the Southeastern Savoyards, an operetta repertory company, the Lyric was the only professional musical theatre company in Atlanta until 2016. Since 2013 the company made its home at the Jennie T. Anderson Theatre on the Cobb Civic Center Complex, a 600-seat venue which, prior to the pandemic, the Lyric regularly sold out.

Kind of work they did: The Lyric presented Broadway standards, from My Fair Lady to Rent, as well as lesser-known musicals like The IT Girl. They also collaborated with the Jennie T. Anderson Theatre on drive-ins, festivals, and one-night concerts. Many young performers got Equity cards through Lyric productions, while Broadway talent would sometimes come out to Atlanta for a Lyric run.

Reason for closure: The Lyric closed in March, citing financial strain and insufficient funding to either complete its 42nd season or embark on a 43rd. Confronted with these financial challenges alongside dwindling audience numbers, the Lyric's board voted to dissolve the organization. Remaining productions in the season, including Pippin, were canceled. Frequent performer Galen Crawley told : "It is heartbreaking that the board would vote to dissolve instead of mounting a capital campaign or signaling, in some way, that they needed help."
Oakland, Calif., 2007-2022
Bay Area Children's Theatre

Who they were: Founded and run by Nina Meehan for most of its run, the theatre had a budget of approximately $750,000 as of 2021, a year after Khalia Davis was named artistic director. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that BATC had hoped to raise as much by the new fiscal year on July 1 with their Save Our Stage campaign, which they announced in early May.

Kind of work they did: As their name suggests, Bay Area Children's Theatre staged Theatre for Young Audiences shows and other family-friendly fare. They were known for adapting popular children's books for the stage, including The Very Hungry Caterpillar. They also produced shows targeted for the interests (and attention spans) of toddlers and ran robust youth arts education programs.

Reason for closure: The theatre announced their abrupt and immediate closure on May 17, reporting that patron donations for the Save Our Stage campaign were insufficient to cover the theatre's operating costs due to "growing, insurmountable financial burdens" (and despite the fact that their 2022 ticket sales were up 9 percent from 2019). Like many theatres that have closed or paused programming, BATC cited the financial impact of the COVID shutdown in their decision. Christina Clark Bloodgood, the outgoing board president, told the Chronicle's Lily Janiak that many Bay Area actors the company relied upon had been priced out of the area and now required the theatre to pay to house them.
Great Barrington, Mass., 2007-2021
Berkshire Playwrights Lab

Who they were: Founded by Joe Cacaci, Jim Frangione, Bob Jaffe, and Matthew Penn, Berkshire Playwrights Lab provided opportunities for writers to encourage, develop, and present new plays. A Staged Reading Series gave playwrights an intensive four-day rehearsal process ahead of a free public reading. BLP also launched the Radius Playwrights Festival and the Berkshire Voices program to cultivate and encourage theatrical talent in the local area.

Kind of work they did: BPL developed work by acclaimed playwright James Anthony Tyler and produced his play Some Old Black Man in New York in 2018. (Tyler also became a co-artistic director of the festival.) The festival also developed Jane Anderson's Mother of the Maid, which was then produced by Shakespeare & Co. in Massachusetts and the Public Theater in a production starring Glenn Close.

Reason for closure: BPL presented a virtual festival in 2020 but remained dark in 2021. The festival was unable to remain financially viable without resuming full operations, and announced its closure later in 2021.
Chicago, 2003-2023
BoHo Theatre

Who they were: With a typical storefront model, BoHo staged works in rental venues like the Edge Theater. In pre-pandemic times, their season featured between three and five mainstage productions plus special events.

Kind of work they did: Inspired by the bohemian pillars, BoHo facilitated a warm, family-friendly atmosphere in both process and product, producing both established musicals like Big Fish and new plays by emerging writers.

Reason for closure: BoHo had already called off spring 2023 programming, but realized after a January board meeting that they would not be able to secure the funds to both sustain a theatre season and pay workers beyond 2023. The company closed after investigating many options (which included downsizing the season and merging with another nonprofit).
Seattle, 1990-2023
Book-It Repertory Theatre

Who they were: Founded in 1990 by co-artistic directors Jane Jones and Myra Platt, Book-It transformed literature into theatre. Their productions reached 60,000 K-12 students in Washington schools annually. Their budget last year was nearly $1.6 million.

Kind of work they did: Book-It employed a unique style of theatrical production, with the text of literary works spoken as well as staged, and prose narration recited by actors alongside a character's dialogue. The company adapted countless classic novels, including Moby-Dick, Pride and Prejudice and Howards End. Book-It also adapted contemporary novels by local authors. Book-It's final production was David Greig's adaptation of Solaris, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem.

Reason for closure: Book-It announced that it had ceased operations in June. Founders Jones and Platt had stepped down in 2020 to make way for new leadership, and a number of personnel changes followed: managing director Kayti Barnett-O'Brien left in 2022, and new artistic director Gus Meaneary announced his own departure in April. Interim artistic director Kelly Kitchens and Book-It's board determined that decreased ticket sales, limited individual giving, and increased production costs made future seasons unfeasible. "We all still believe in the art form and can't help but hope that we will see a show in the Book-It narrative style on a Seattle stage again," board secretary Becky Monk said.
San Francisco, 1983-2022
EXIT Theatre

Who they were: EXIT Theatre was born when founding artistic director Christina Augello staged a new play in a hotel lobby in the Tenderloin neighborhood, casting locals from the area. Though EXIT grew and came to operate two venues in San Francisco, it always retained an experimental focus, providing a home for vaudevillians, improvisers, and magicians. Walking in to EXIT on a given night, you might find a play to your left and a burlesque show to the right.

Kind of work they did: San Francisco Chronicle theatre critic Lily Janiak praised the company's "devotion to the new and the now, the weird, and the wild." Significant productions have included works by resident playwright Sean Owens including Odd By Nature and Naught But Pirates, and Waiting for FEMA by Karen Ripley and Annie Larson. EXIT also founded the annual San Francisco Fringe Festival in 1992, and its sister venue still hosts the festival annually.

Reason for closure: EXIT closed its flagship venue on Eddy Street in 2022 due to rising costs and shrinking audiences post-reopening. Augello moved north to Arcata and now programs out of a 35-seat space, another EXIT outpost, and a sister venue Exit on Taylor remains open, subleased to other companies with the exception of the Fringe Festival, still hosted at Taylor, for which Augello returns to San Francisco to program. This year's festival runs Aug. 10-26.
Oak Brook/Chicago, 1997-2023
First Folio Theatre

Who they were: Known for performing in the impressive Mayslake Peabody Estate, First Folio offered " high-quality performances to the Chicagoland suburbs " with attention to audience experience. As of 2021, their budget was close to $255,000.

Kind of work they did: First Folio began to fill a gap in directing opportunities for women and non-musical theatre work. In the summers, Shakespeare productions would draw artists and audiences to their outdoor venue, but their indoor space featured both contemporary and classical works year-round.

Reason for closure: In late 2021, First Folio shared plans for a 2024 closure, with co-founder and executive director David Rice citing financial trouble sustaining a full-time staff and being eligible for Chicago theatre grants. But early 2023 brought compounded difficulties that led them to cancel their final productions.
San Francisco, 1998-2021
foolsFURY

Who they were: As its name may indicate, foolsFURY was an adventurous company focused on ensemble-oriented experimental work. The troupe produced both original works and deconstructed classics, and allowed its artists longer periods of development, inviting audiences into the process and showing works at various stages of development. SF Arts Monthly once hailed the company as "one of the brightest stars of the San Francisco experimental theatre scene."

Kind of work they did: foolsFURY first garnered wide attention with the world premiere of Monster in the Dark by Doug Dorst in 2008, a co-production with Berkeley-based Shotgun Players. It was followed the next year with the U.S. premiere of Fabrice Melquiot's The Devil on All Sides, which toured from San Francisco to Performance Space New York (formerly P.S. 122). foolsFURY has supported many new playwrights through new commissions, including Sheila Callaghan, Katie Pearl, Angela Santillo, and Kate Tarker.

Reason for closure: foolsFURY cited multiple factors in its decision to close: the 2020 departure of founding artistic director Ben Yalom, the 2020 wildfires that destroyed the Sonoma County home and artist retreat center of current artistic director Debórah Eliezer, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which destabilized the small and nomadic company's infrastructure. foolsFury's "Legacy Project," a thorough archive of the company's work and history, is now available on the company's website.
Chicago, 2001-2022
House Theatre

Who they were: Founded by creatives from Southern Methodist University and the British American Drama Academy, this ensemble-based theatre was known for critically acclaimed, risk-taking adaptations and new work. After 2021, the company had planned to execute a much-anticipated anti-racist action plan.

Kind of work they did: A Chicago staple, the company memorably staged Death and Harry Houdini, The Terrible Tragedy of Peter Pan, The Hammer Trinity, United Flight 232, and more. Countless artists in the area had crossed paths with this company.

Reason for closure: Board president Renee Duba's statement read, "We did not have the financial momentum or audience/donor support to continue beyond this fiscal year. We chose instead to maximize our current year programming and to honor all present commitments and partnerships with a thoughtfully planned exit from the Chicago theatre scene."
Louisville, 1976-2021
Humana Festival of New American Plays

Who they were: Founded in 1976 by director Jon Jory, the Humana Festival of New American Plays was a world-renowned festival presented by Actors Theatre of Louisville which celebrated the contemporary American playwright. It was sponsored by Humana, a health insurance company based in Louisville, starting in 1979. A wide array of world premieres, usually six to 10 plays, were presented over multiple weeks in a flurry of new work which attracted artistic leaders from around the world to Louisville.

Kind of work they did: Humana hosted premieres by Will Eno, Sarah Ruhl, David Marguiles, Beth Henley, and Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins. Many Humana premieres went on to major productions and significant acclaim, such as Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo and The Christians by Lucas Hnath. Obie-winning director Les Waters ran the Actors Theatre and curated the festival 2012-2018.

Reason for closure: The Humana Festival was canceled in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, then presented in virtual form in 2021. In March 2022, Actors Theatre confirmed the festival would not be held that year, citing a need to "reimagine a 21st-century model that is sustainable, equitable, and radically accessible," according to artistic director Robert Barry Fleming. Humana confirmed that their funding relationship with Actors Theatre had ended. Fleming said the festival could return in a different form, but that Actors Theatre was focused on year-round new-play development programs.
Chicago, 2010-2023
Interrobang Theatre Project

Who they were: With a pre-pandemic budget of around $70,000, Interrobang was in residence at Chicago's Rivendell Theatre, performing in Rivendell's 50-seat black box theatre.

Reason for closure: In a statement announcing the end of the company's run, Interrobang cited "a shrinking board, staff, and ensemble due to pandemic-related pivots, hiring challenges, and shifting expectations surrounding pay and sustainability."
New York City, 1994-2021
The Lark

Who they were: Formerly Lark Play Development Center, the Lark was an international theatre laboratory dedicated to discovering and developing playwrights. Founded by John Clinton Eisner, the Lark sought to nurture American and international artists at all career stages by providing resources such as money, space, collaborators, audiences, professional connections, and the freedom to design their own processes of exploration. As of 2022, the Lark had an approximate budget of $1,371,708.

Kind of work they did: The Lark hosted the Playwrights' Week new work festival, various writers' retreats, workshops, readings, roundtables, fellowships, and international exchange programs. It sought to be an artistic home for new voices and new ideas.

Reason for closure: According to a statement from Oct. 2021, the Lark board of directors voted unanimously to end operations citing "no sustainable and viable path forward" for the organization financially. The Lark's financial model depended almost entirely on individual and institutional giving. Members of the playwriting community, including former director of development Nora Brigid Monahan, questioned the board's account, referencing issues of mismanagement, neglect, and gaslighting, as well as conflicts between the board and artists. Several of the Lark's key programs were rehomed to other theatres.
New York City, 1995-2022
Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab

Who they were: The Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab was a developmental program for stage directors from around the country and the world. Founded by former LCT dramaturg Anne Cattaneo, the Lab combined approaches from directing, dramaturgy, different types of work, and different cultures. Intentionally non-academic, the Lab was geared toward professional directors in early career stages and was free of charge. Members were accepted based on the stories and ideas written in applications. More than 1,600 directors went through the program.

Kind of work they did: The Lab was an intensive, six-day-a-week, 10-hour-a-day, three-week program of workshops, shared sessions, rehearsals, investigations, theatregoing, and discussions with accomplished and well-known artists. The LCT Directors Lab was nominated twice for a Tony Award. The Lab had sister programs based in the North, West, and Mediterranean regions, as well as in Chicago.

Reason for closure: After the last gathering of the Lab in 2019, Cattaneo was planning a 2020 iteration, then scotched by COVID. The Lab's offices never reopened, she said, and in 2022, considering among other issues the Trump Administration's travel policies, which complicated access for international directors, she decided to retire. LCT has said that they intend to continue the Lab's work in some form in the future.
Rancho Cucamonga, 2006-2020
MainStreet Theatre Co.

Who they were: MainStreet Theatre Company presented theatre for young audiences at the City of Rancho Cucamonga's Lewis Family Playhouse for 14 years. Led by Mireya Hepner, the company's founder and sole employee, MainStreet was heralded for mature, artfully crafted productions which "happened to be stories kids could come to," as Hepner put it. Shows starred Equity actors and were directed/designed by respected "adult" theater artists from the area.

Kind of work they did: MainStreet shows were typically adapted from popular children's book titles. Notable productions included A Wrinkle in Time, Miss Nelson Is Missing, new play Aesop in Rancho Cucamonga and the company's final production, And Then They Came Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank. Hepner's work aimed to never talk down to young audiences-programming was challenging and talkbacks ensured kids engaged deeply with the questions raised by each show.

Reason for closure: Hepner was technically an employee of the City of Rancho Cucamonga, which operated MainStreet's former venue, and her position was eliminated by the city in May 2020 as part of cuts forced by the Covid-19 shutdown. At the time, the City Council stated that the theatre was not dissolved and would return at some point, but it currently remains inactive.
New York City, 1993-2023
Metropolitan Playhouse

Who they were: Since 1993, Metropolitan Playhouse has presented small-scale productions along with readings, workshops, and chamber concerts, becoming a modest Off-Off-Broadway institution. The company brought renewed attention to over 100 forgotten American plays. Since 1997, Metropolitan Playhouse has made its home in a 51-seat theatre on the second floor of the Cornelia Connelly Center in the East Village. The company received a 2011 Obie grant from The Village Voice and a 2014 Outstanding Performing Arts Group Award from the Victorian Society of New York.

Kind of work they did: Metropolitan Playhouse's first production was Dion Boucicault's rarely revived melodrama The Poor of New York. Beginning in 2001, each season tackled a particular theme: Faith, Starting Over, The American Dream, etc. The Playhouse operated under the Equity Showcase Code, which permits brief runs for minimal compensation. The theatre placed particular focus on its neighborhood's culture and history, presenting the Alphabet City Monologues (based on interviews with the theatre's neighbors) and the East Village Chronicles (one-act plays inspired by the area).

Reason for closure: Producing artistic director Alex Roe stated that the Playhouse had "reached the limits inherent in a company of our small size, and it is time to draw the curtain." Roe left the door open to future productions based on a different funding model. For now the theatre will focus on creating an easily accessible online archive of their history.
Chicago, 2008-2023
The New Coordinates

Who they were: Formerly known as The New Colony, The New Coordinates didn't have a permanent home and innovated modalities to accommodate new-work development pre-, during, and post-pandemic. They were known for gathering writers everywhere from a bar to the Den Theatre.

Kind of work they did: With every production slot reserved for new work created from scratch, their mission emphasized newness in the makeup of art, artists, and audiences.

Reason for closure: After a challenging year of not finding financial footing in the return to in-person programming, former co-artistic director Fin Coe lamented that the company had to cancel its final production a week before tech. In retrospect, he wishes that smaller companies had clearer pathways to survive, grants had fewer applicant limitations, and TNC had cultivated stronger ties with its location/community.
New York City, 1993-2023
New Ohio Theatre

Who they were: A supporter and presenter of New York City independent theatre companies creating bold new work, New Ohio began life as the Ohio Theatre in 1993 and initially operated in a warehouse in SoHo. In 2011, the company moved into their space on Christopher Street in the West Village and became the New Ohio Theatre, renovating and improving the 74-seat space while giving a home to 100-plus experimental new works by emerging artists.

Kind of work they did: New Ohio hosted productions from terraNOVA Collective, Page 73, The NeoFuturists, the Assembly, Vampire Cowboys, Bedlam, Untitled Theater Company No. 61, Blessed Unrest and many more. Annual programs included the Ice Factory Festival, Now In Process and The Archive Residency (co-run by IRT Theatre).

Reason for closure: Artistic director Robert Lyons cited increasing financial pressures in closing the New Ohio as of August 2023. Lyons also felt it was a good time to hand off artistic control to a new generation of artists. Alongside the closure announcement in February, the building's landlord began accepting proposals for a new company to take up residency; no further update has yet followed.
Columbia, Md., 1993-2023
Rep Stage

Who they were: In residence at Howard Community College, Rep Stage received funding from the Howard Arts Council, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the county and state governments, in addition to individual donors.

Kind of work they did: Rep Stage produced both classic and contemporary plays and musicals for audiences in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area. Their farewell production, William Finn and James Lapine's musical Falsettos, closed in May. "Today I choose to focus on gratitude and celebrate the work of the incredible artists who trusted me, journeyed with me, played with me, laughed with me, cried with me, took risks for me, and celebrated the power of theatre," artistic director Joseph W. Ritsch wrote on Facebook on his last day at Rep Stage.

Reason for closure: Rep Stage announced last November that Howard Community College would be shutting down the theatre at the end of the academic year. DC Theater Arts said that the decision "will allow the college to refocus funding to programs and services that directly serve students." However, many students in the college's Dance, Theatre, & Audio Video Production department worked on Rep Stage shows.
San Francisco/Oakland, 2007-2022
PianoFight

Who they were: PianoFight was a community-driven independent arts venue which partnered with local artists to present a wide variety of work in two intimate theatres, while also offering food and cocktails. The company hosted 1,500 performances for over 50,000 audience members in a given year. During the day, its spaces were used as offices and classrooms for community nonprofits. PianoFight had one space on Taylor Street, in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, and a second in downtown Oakland.

Kind of work they did: PianoFight welcomed music, comedy, dance, drag, film screenings, magic, variety shows and more-as described in the San Francisco Chronicle, its two spaces hosted "everything from a taping of a podcast about menstrual periods, a dating show aimed at disrupting dating apps, and the San Francisco Neo-Futurists ' whirlwind 30 plays in 60 minutes."

Reason for closure: PianoFight reopened both of its spaces in February 2022, but struggled with low ticket and bar sales. When the company learned it would be getting less money than expected from the California Venues Grant Program, the decision was made to close up shop.
Chicago, 2005-2020
The Right Brain Project

Who they were: Many of the troupe's performances took place at RBP Rorschach, an intimate space tucked away in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood that sat around 20 audience members for each performance.

Kind of work they did: Named the Chicago Reader's "best Off-Loop theatre company" in 2013, the RBP strove to present "startlingly intimate, proudly raw, and innately political" works that reflected the passions of both the company's artists and Chicago audiences. Production highlights include the Midwest premiere of Virgilio Piñera's Electra Garrigó, Oscar Wilde's Salome, Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade, a Euripides adaptation in The Bacchae Revisited, and the world premieres of Terry Boyle's Lured: The Curse of Swans and Michaela Heidemann's Odessa.

Reason for closure: The Right Brain Project announced its permanent closure in September 2020, stating that "subsisting as a small nonprofit theatre has never been easy," but the new challenges presented during the pandemic gave the theatre "a challenge outside of the RBP's current capacity." The statement goes on to say that the company was seeing this as an opportunity "to forge new creative families."
San Diego, 1976-2022
San Diego REP

Who they were: Founded in 1976 by Sam Woodhouse and D.W. Jacobs, San Diego REP grew out of the street theatre company Indian Magique. The Rep's mission has been to produce intimate, provocative, and inclusive theatre and to promote an interconnected community through progressive political and social values. The company first made its home at Sixth Avenue Playhouse, a space inside a church in downtown San Diego, before moving to a larger venue, the Lyceum, which the city had planned to tear down. The Rep's success in drawing audiences convinced the city to instead upgrade and expand the theater, reopening it in 1986 with a 500-seat mainstage and a smaller flexible space.

Kind of work they did: The REP produced or hosted over 500 events at the Lyceum each year. New plays, reimagined classics and experimental work filled their seasons, along with numerous festivals including the Latinx New Play Festival, Black Voices Reading Series, and Kuumba Fest, a festival of African and African American performance. The REP received a 1998 Tony nomination for It Ain't Nothin' But the Blues. Other notable productions include the West Coast premieres of American Buffalo and K2. Whoopi Goldberg was a regular on the Rep stage in its early years, and returned in 1993 for a two-night benefit.

Reason for closure: In June 2022, the Rep canceled all remaining productions for the year and laid off all staff, citing low ticket sales, costs associated with recent flooding, operating amidst an active construction zone, and the loss of major donors. The Lyceum Theatre is owned by the city and continues to host other events. "Our goal is to bring the REP back stronger, to continue making provocative, progressive theatre, and we're working toward this future," artistic director Woodhouse, who had retired in February, said in a statement.
Chicago, 2008-2023
Sideshow Theatre

Who they were: A non-Equity theatre company that operated out of rental spaces, Sideshow staged plays in Chicago's more intimate spaces with diverse ensembles. They featured an in-house commissioning/new-play development program called The Freshness Initiative and annually hosted the Chicago League of Lady Arm Wrestlers.

Kind of work they did: Their site emphasizes a passion for"theatre for the curious," an alchemy of new plays, adaptations, and stories "to mine the collective unconscious of the world."

Reason for closure: Their farewell messages cited several contributing factors: a canceled 2022 gala, departure from their longtime home at Victory Gardens, and the naturally diverging lives of company members.
Baltimore, 2007-2023
Single Carrot Theatre

Who they were: Founded by a group of theatre artists from Colorado who planted roots in Baltimore, the company expanded and moved from the city's arts district of Station North to Waverly, where they were in residence at the church Saint John's in the Village. Their budget was approximately $571,000 as of 2021.

Kind of work they did: Single Carrot was known for immersive works and collaborations with international artists and companies, including Belarus Free Theatre. In 2017, they produced the celebrated original work Promenade: Baltimore in a collaboration with Stereo AKT of Budapest. The show took audience members on a bus journey through city streets as actors performed on sidewalks. In 2021, the pandemic took the company outside again in Keep Off the Grass: A Guide to [Something] on the grounds of Saint John's.

Reason for closure: In their January announcement of closure, Single Carrot cited multiple contributing factors, including the planned departures of artistic director and founding company member Genevieve de Mahy and executive director Emily Cory. The theatre has also struggled with "staffing shortages and stretched human capacity" since the onset of COVID and wrote on their website that they "could not offer fair compensation to bring in artists and staff members and keep them." Prior to announcing their closure, Single Carrot also postponed a production of Aziza Barnes's play BLKS, due to potential mistreatment of Black members of the cast and artistic team. "Single Carrot's inadequate communication resulted in the direct harm to Black artists, which is antithetical to our mission and values," the company wrote in a December email. The company recently published a 42-page impact report on its work and legacy, which states that the theatre staged 33 world premieres and commissioned 24 works over its 15 years.
New York City/Saratoga Springs, N.Y., 1992-2022
The SITI Company

Who they were: A troupe of like-minded artists who came together around the theatre teaching of Tadashi Suzuki and the Viewpoints-influenced work of director Anne Bogart, SITI Company was known both for its rigorous physical training and for a body of experimental, ensemble-driven stage work. Among other venues, they performed frequently at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Wexner Center for the Arts, and Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Kind of work they did: With playwrights like Charles Mee Jr., as well as in ensemble-created works, adaptations of classics, and collaborations with dance and opera companies, SITI forged a unique presentational aesthetic influenced equally by the physical forms of Suzuki and the spatial/improvisational spirit of Viewpoints. Major works included bobrauschenbergamerica (with Chuck Mee), Steel Hammer (with composer Julia Wolfe), Death and the Ploughman, and Room (inspired by Virginia Woolf).

Reason for closure: SITI considered ways to continue and/or merge with other companies, but ultimately decided to cap their 30 years as a company with a final celebration and production. A complete archive of their work is available at the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University.
New Orleans, 1986-2022
Southern Rep

Who they were: Originally located in Canal Place, a multilevel shopping center at the foot of Canal Street, the company later took up residence at Loyola University New Orleans, and then, in 2019, moved into a permanent home inside the former St. Rose de Lima church in the historically Black neighborhood of Treme.

What kind of work they did: Seeking to present a selection of new works and classics that spoke to the New Orleans community, they did their share of Tennessee Williams, of course, but also a mix of new and old plays, including works by Taylor Mac, Sarah DeLappe, and Ntozake Shange.

Reason for closure: In the move to Treme, the company lost a certain portion of its long-standing white audience, then failed in their efforts to build relationships with the Black community, with some employees speaking publicly about racialized trauma in the transition. A silver lining: The former St. Rose de Lima Church has since reopened as the André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts & Cultural Justice (ACC New Orleans), a Black-led, BIPOC community-serving, multi-tenant, performance art and cultural justice venue.
New York City, 2006-2021
St. Luke's Theatre

Who they were: Saint Luke's Lutheran Church on 46th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues, in the heart of Hell's Kitchen, includes an intimate 175-seat theatre in its basement. Beginning in 2006 it was run by producer Edmund Gaynes, who dubbed the space St. Luke's Theatre. Gaynes programmed a wide array of simply staged crowd pleasers which performed in repertory.

Reason for closure: Gaynes announced St. Luke's closure in January of 2021, blaming the city's "forced lockdown" and saying the theatre had been shuttered "by government fiat." The church staff then sought new leadership to reinvent the space, and it reopened as Playhouse 46 at St. Luke's in April 2022 under the leadership of producer Jennifer Pluff with the new musical Islander.
Utah/Wyoming/New York City, 1984-2022
Sundance Theatre Program

Who they were: When Robert Redford's film and media company took over the Utah Playwriting Conference, founded in 1980, it was renamed Sundacne Playwrights Lab. Led by David Kranes, it offered intensive script development for writers, who were invited to participate based on the recommendations of theatres. In 1997, Kranes stepped down and it was renamed the Theatre Lab, a sign of an expanded focus on all kinds of theatre (musicals, dance-theatre, performance art, etc.). Philip Himberg was named the producing director of the overall Theatre Program. A few years later, an invitation-only playwrights retreat began at the UCross Foundation in Wyoming, and the Lab itself sprang free from Utah, with iterations in New York City, Massachusetts, East Africa, and Morocco.

What kind of work they did: Among the works shepherded through Sundance's unique development process were the musicals Passing Strange, Spring Awakening, The Light in the Piazza, Fun Home, and A Strange Loop,and the plays The Laramie Project, I Am My Own Wife, Yellowman, Dogeaters, Skeleton Crew, and Indecent.

Reason for closure: When Himberg stepped down in 2019, his colleague Christopher Hibma took over, and the Lab went virtual in 2020. Then Sundance announced "a break" to contemplate a "hybrid" model that would combine the Sundance Film Music Program and the Film's New Frontiers Program with the vestiges of the Theatre Program. According to Himberg, that proposal was shelved in May 2022, and the entire theatre program with it.
Seattle, 2013-2022
Theatre22

Who they were: Founded by Corey McDaniel, who also served as the company's producing artistic director, the company had a budget of approximately $80,300 as of 2021. From 2015 until the 2020 shutdown, Theatre22 staged their productions at 12th Avenue Arts.

Kind of work they did: Theatre22 produced a variety of contemporary works, including many by local Seattle playwrights like Wayne Rawley. At the time of their closing, the theatre had produced 16 mainstage shows. Their last production was the play Nonsense and Beauty by Scott C. Sickles, directed by McDaniel.

Reason for closure: Theatre22 announced their closure last August. They had only staged two indoor shows since the onset of COVID before facing the realization that they could not remain at their venue. According to the Seattle Times, Theatre22 signed a contract to rent space from a Seattle Public Theater (SPT) venue to produce two shows. McDaniel told the Times 's Dusty Somers that he did not do his "due diligence" to ensure that Theatre22 would be able to work with SPT after 2022, leaving the company to scramble for a potential new venue or fold.
Greensboro, N.C., 2002-2023
Triad Stage

Who they were: Triad Stage was founded in 2002 to bring live, professional theatre to a rejuvenated downtown Greensboro, the third most populous city in North Carolina. Co-founders Preston Lane and Richard Whittington purchased a vacant building and transformed it into a theatre center with a 300-seat live performance space (an 80-seat cabaret space was added in 2008).

Kind of work they did: Triad presented revivals and classics alongside occasional new works. Some new plays were by Southern writers, like Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder's White Lightning, while others came to Triad following New York success, such as Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities. Triad planned 2023-24 season was to include the world premiere of Jekyll by Patricia Lynn; Every Christmas Story Ever Told (And Then Some) by Michael Carleton, James FitzGerald, and John K. Alvarez; Chicken and Biscuits by Douglas Lyons; and Coal Country by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen.

Reason for closure: When theatres closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Triad was already carrying an accumulated deficit of $1.5 million. During the shutdown, the theatre faced a reckoning around allegations of a toxic culture and seasons dominated by white artists, and Lane stepped down as artistic director in November 2020 after facing accusations of sexual misconduct. Triad shifted its artistic focus to include newer productions and more diverse storytelling, as well as a reduced operating budget, but was still unable to sustain operations following poor ticket sales.
Albuquerque, N.M., 1993-2020
Tricklock

Who they were: Tricklock Company devised genre-mashing new works that combined shadow puppetry, song, and physical story creation to explore "the harsher side of humanity." Alongside strong connections with its own community, Tricklock also placed particular focus on international outreach, with members teaching and performing in Uganda, Serbia, Scotland, Poland, Israel, and Colombia.

Kind of work they did: The company's breakthrough production was a new devised version of The Seagull, directed by Leonardo Shapiro of New York's Shaliko Company, which toured across the country 1996-97. Beginning in 2001, Tricklock presented the annual Revolutions International Theatre Festival, a 3-week gathering of experimental theatremakers from across the world. Tricklock created many original works, including The Glorious and Bloodthirsty Billy the Kid, the Greatest Serial Killer of Our Time, which toured from 2004-07.

Reason for closure: The COVID-19 shutdown began just as Tricklock's 2020 Revolutions Festival had opened, creating a financial strain as Tricklock paid out most expenses for the festival but saw little income. Tricklock closed in August of 2020. Founding member and executive director Juli Hendren went on to found Revo Inc., a nonprofit providing opportunities for people to explore global citizenship through the performing arts. Revo presented the 21st Revolutions Festival in 2021, with two live events alongside mostly online programming.
New York City, 2005-2023
Under the Radar Festival

Who they were: An annual theatre festival spotlighting experimental artists ranging from emerging talents to masters in the field. Started by Mark Russell, the festival initially premiered at St. Ann's Warehouse with a focus on U.S. theatre companies, then moved to the Public Theater, where it branched out into the international community and expanded in duration from five days to two weeks.

Kind of work they did: UTR was known for presenting independent, experimental, contemporary works. Over the years UTR featured work by 229 companies from 42 countries, including Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Gob Squad, Belarus Free Theatre, 600 Highwaymen, Guillermo Calderón, and Young Jean Lee. Under the Radar also held annual professional symposiums featuring panels and conversations related to festival programming. The Public was the festival's producer, but served as the presenter, not the producer, of individual shows, whose creators raised money to cover most of their costs. Many international shows were sponsored by their home countries. UTR had an annual budget of about $1 million, excluding salaries and operating costs.

Reason for closure: The Public Theater announced it had placed the festival on "extended hiatus" in June 2023, citing financial pressures, with no promise when or if the festival might continue. Russell's employment at the theatre was terminated. According to , the Public chose to sacrifice UTR while retaining in-house programs like the Mobile Unit and Public Works because UTR was not a creative or originating program of the theatre.
Washington, D.C., 2013-2023
Unexpected Stage Company

Who they were: Founded in 2013 by Rachel Stroud-Goodrich and Christopher Goodrich, who are also married, the company chiefly operated out of River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Bethesda, with a mission to "explore the intricacies of the human experience by delving into the unnoticed and unexplored corners of interpersonal relationships, and providing a theatrical home for underrepresented voices."

Kind of work they did: Unexpected's final production was Fade by Tanya Saracho. The company previously staged Sophisticated New Ones, a play by Keith Powell ( 30 Rock), 8 Stops by Deb Margolin, and The Few by Samuel D. Hunter.

Reason for closure: Unexpected's statement cited multiple reasons for closure: audience reticence to return to live shows amid the ongoing presence of COVID-19, the company's married artistic directors craving more time with their three daughters, and financial strain due to rising costs.

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Theatre in Crisis: What We're Losing, and What Comes Next

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A look at this extraordinary moment of contraction for the U.S. theatre field, including a complete list of closures since March 2020.

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In March 2019, a group of Steppenwolf Theatre leaders gathered at the offices of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, an internationally renowned architecture and design firm that had designed the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia and the 120-story Wuhan Greenland Center in China. Not coincidentally, the firm had also worked on The Yard theater at Chicago Shakespeare, a $35 million project that opened in 2017.

They were hardly the first globally famous architects to work with a Chicago-area theater. In 2016, Writers Theatre in Glencoe opened a $28 million theater, designed by the renowned architect Jeanne Gang and located in a leafy suburb with a population of just 9,000 people; Writers had made its bones in the back of a bookstore but the Gang commission was announced at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Steppenwolf was spending more than $54 million on its new theater-in-the-round, a 50,000-square-foot expansion including classroom and rehearsal spaces. Gill said he and his firm had "approached the project in the way that you'd think about a play." "The ultimate idea," he said at the time, "is that there will now be a village of architecture at Steppenwolf that works as a full ensemble."

Like the projects it succeeded, Gill's eloquent words reflected a formidable level of ambition. Three new, world-class theater buildings with a cumulative total cost of $117 million! Chicago theater, it seemed at that moment, was seeing an inestimably thrilling explosion of growth.

But the landscape of the Chicago, and the broader American, theater, has changed so much since 2019 it is almost unrecognizable.

Both of Steppenwolf's top leaders in 2017 - artistic director Anna D. Shapiro and executive director David Schmitz - are no longer with the company, which reports it has since lost some 20% of its subscription audience. Neither is Writers Theatre artistic director Michael Halberstam. Nor are Chicago Shakespeare executive director Criss Henderson and artistic director Barbara Gaines. In fact, leadership at top Chicago nonprofit theaters has almost all changed over, almost all at once.

Meanwhile, Victory Gardens has gone dark in all but name, leaving the previously restored Biograph Theatre as an empty eyesore in a prime location. The Royal George Theatre, a long-standing venue with a clutch of differently sized spaces, is being redeveloped for condos. Stage 773, once a storied off-Loop venue known as the Theatre Building, is now a bar and art exhibit. The much-admired Lookingglass Theatre, which operates in a rent-free space on storied Michigan Avenue, has put out an existential SOS. Even the beloved Midnight Circus, which has toured Chicago's parks with eye-popping talents, says it is now "out of options" to continue.

The House Theatre of Chicago has gone dark. So have, since that day in Gill's office, such theater companies as the 16th Street Theater, Akvavit Theatre, Aston Rep Theatre Co., Awkward Pause Theatre, Black Button Eyes Productions, BoHo Theatre Company, Broken Nose Theatre, Brown Paper Box Co., Chicago Theater Works, Chicago Mammals, Dog and Pony Theatre, Eclipse Theatre, the longtime First Folio, GayCo Productions, Gorilla Tango Theatre, Interrobang Theatre Project, Irish Theatre of Chicago, The New Coordinates, Provision Theater, Quest Theatre, Red Tape Theatre, Refuge Theatre Project, Right Brain Project, Route 66 Theatre Company, Side Project Theatre, Sideshow Theatre, Stockyards Theatre Project, Strange Tree Group, Underscore Theatre Co., Vitalist Theatre, Waltzing Mechanics, WildClaw Theatre and the Windy City Playhouse, the last of which used to run crowd-pleasing shows for months at a time. This is not even a complete list.

All over the city, albeit with some exceptions, theaters have been weighing the pros and cons of letting their difficulties be known without looking like they are asking donors to throw money at a lost cause.

On June 30, Lookingglass announced it would reduce its full-time staff from 24 to 10 employees and pause programming until at least the late spring of 2024. The number of shows, and the length of their runs, have been reduced almost everywhere. Steppenwolf has slated no mainstage shows between Dec. 3 and March 14, 2024, once its peak season (a spokesperson says guest programming likely will fill those spots). Court Theatre's 2023-24 season features just four Chicago shows running for little more than three weeks each after opening night, a far cry from the theater's heyday. With that limited potential gross, the theater has to support its full-time staff. Even if it sells every ticket and extends, its income prospects have become limited.

These are Chicago's most famous theater companies, replete with Tony Awards and long records of artistic brilliance. What the heck happened?

Firstly, this is a national problem. Theater is struggling everywhere.

Job losses and programming pauses have been reported at such illustrious institutions as Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Schmitz made his exit earlier this year after leaving Steppenwolf), Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles (which canceled a previously announced season) and, most recently, Theatreworks Silicon Valley (which recently said it needed at least $3 million just to stay afloat).

Second, Chicago has lost a lot of theaters because it had a lot of theaters to lose.

In a city like this, known for the youth of its artists, some churn has long existed as artists move away and the companies they founded fade away with them. But that clearly doesn't explain the bloodbath of the last four years.

Beyond that, the answer to the question of what happened is, to put it mildly, a bitterly contested space. But the panic is real.

Part of the issue here is the complexity of America's theater landscape, as mirrored in Chicago. Companies run the gamut from nonprofit, community-oriented, avowedly anti-capitalist organizations with fundamentally social missions focused on political change, to high-cost commercial operations in the very capitalist business of producing profitable live entertainment. Often, their needs are divergent. And the former typically is contemptuous of the latter.

Theaters have become fond of phrases like "the audience is not yet back," and blame also has been attached to the purported loss of the theatergoing habit during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as audience members' newfound preference for in-home streaming.

There is some truth there. High-quality TV shows like Hulu's "The Bear" have made inroads with the former theater audience. Painfully for the theater, the massive improvement in TV mostly has flowed from theatrically trained writers and actors, who then compete on the opposing team on an unfair playing field. One widely acclaimed episode of "The Bear" even featured a chaotic and traumatic family dinner party, not far removed from a strikingly similar scene in Tracy Letts' iconic Steppenwolf play, "August: Osage County." Although "The Bear" is centered on a restaurant and chefs, it often has felt like its true gestalt was Chicago theater; it featured similarly intense acting and drew from themes that Chicago playwrights have been writing about here for years. For less reward.

When Letts wrote "August: Osage" in 2007, Steppenwolf had that aesthetic space to itself; now it has new competition. Adding to these woes, the domineering rise of team-written, long-form TV has made audiences more impatient with exposition: it's more relaxing to watch characters you already know have their Season 5 adventures than to have to get to know a whole new crew who may or may not appeal.

"Not yet back" may be overly optimistic. There is evidence audiences are very much back at live entertainment, just not at most nonprofit theaters. The concert giant Live Nation posted record-breaking revenue of $3.1 billion in the first quarter of this year - up 73% from the same period last year - with nearly 20 million tickets sold. Concerts are very much back, and more than just Taylor Swift. People got out of the habit of flying, too, but leisure airlines have had a record-breaking summer. Restaurants mostly have recovered and have raised their prices to boot.

Many have called for more government support for theaters, even though the arts received historic amounts of public funding during the pandemic (by typically dismal U.S. standards, at least), an infusion that does not appear to have helped long-term. In most cases, the money has already been spent, often on keeping administrative staff employed. For those with explicitly social missions, such as working with resource-challenged young people, a strong argument can be made for public support. But it's tougher for mainstream institutions coping with a sudden lack of demand.

Recent years have also been a time of great social and cultural change. Demonstrably, audiences have rejected much of the post-pandemic programming, which has focused on ideologically similar plays. Progressive artists see these shows as essential acts of both diversification and political necessity - and fair enough, artists deserve such freedoms. But they often have been stymied by the consumption of theater being a stubbornly voluntary act, and by attendees not being the audience they hoped to reach.

Similarly, a rhetorical war has been waged against older audiences and retirees, open-minded and politically liberal as most of them would claim to be, whose gray hairs have traditionally occupied many seats. They have both the time and the resources to engage with the existential questions theater asks, or used to ask. Many theaters look past the actual age of their audience, serving up plays about problems that people over 40 typically regard as transient, because, as one ages, the head turns to matters of mortality, as Shakespeare well understood. Younger audiences have proved especially hard to reach not least because nonprofit theater can be reluctant to engage with popular culture.

Writers with what are now riskier points of view have largely been excised from the theater. If Second City lampoons Joe Biden, it is with kid gloves on - a huge change from the apolitical satirical creed central to that theater's original mission. To produce the outspoken conservative (and household name) David Mamet in Chicago now would take courage.

Only occasionally have theaters taken their cue from "Barbie," a movie that shrewdly turned the kind of massive pre-awareness that makes engaged people go to the movie theater into an opportunity to deliver a feminist message to a warmed-up and receptive audience.

There are other pressing issues. Most Chicago theaters still operate on an outdated business model: years ago, the late Danny Newman of the Lyric Opera preached the gospel of subscription seasons, multi-ticket packages that ensured patrons came back several times a year. But those were the days before variable pricing and easy resale, when subscriptions were the best deal ever to be available in the marketplace. Today, patrons know cheaper tickets will be on offer before showtime. Subscriptions, as they were once understood, are nearly dead in the water.

Theaters know this - they just have to read their falling subscription numbers - but they find it daunting to free themselves from the seasonal model, even though it means they have to close hit shows, and keep failed ones running. The Goodman Theatre hit this problem with "The Who's Tommy," which was grossing record-breaking numbers, but had to make way for actor conflicts and previously scheduled programming. Compounding this problem, theaters typically produce seasons of shows that are often aimed at different demographics, meaning each then has to be marketed to a new group of people.

Chicago is relatively well-served by arts journalists, at least as compared with most Midwestern cities. But there is no question that the decline in local newspapers hit American theaters hard.

Twenty years ago, a potential audience would happen upon a review when reading a print newspaper. These days, arts coverage has both lessened and become more tightly channeled, even in Chicago. There is no shortage of online material for superfans of the theater, or for Broadway geeks looking for gossip, but people have become much harder to reach.

But the problem least talked about, is that this famously supportive and compassionate industry has allowed what once were internal disputes, such as debates over hiring, programming and the allocation of scarce resources, to spill over into the public sphere.

Anger over compensation is intense. In the Washington Post, writer Monica Byrne recently took the atypically successful Milwaukee Repertory Theatre to task for paying its artistic leader $273,843 - a nice salary, for sure, but by point of comparison, striking writers and actors have been noting Hollywood executives who each make more than $27 million a year for a job that hardly is 100 times more work, or reflective of 100 times more talent and experience. In essence, Byrne's widely shared article calls for an end to the nonprofit theater's high-cost flagships.

"Instead of a world in which you pay astronomical prices to see another tired revival from the mezzanine," she wrote, "imagine there are a dozen theater cells in your area, performing new work in backyards and parks and city squares and empty storefronts."

Such halcyon language is appealing, but those "tired revivals" that people are supposedly watching from the mezzanine are now mostly apocryphal. They're actually rarer than new work and the ticket prices are usually the same.

And why is it that these sentiments rarely are expressed in other art forms? You don't typically read of community orchestras, or local musicians, calling for an end to, say, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Rather, they revere its long-standing excellence.

Not only have theater leaders been attacked in public, sometimes by attackers who are themselves questionable, so have nonprofit boards of directors, volunteers who are bound by laws in their roles that detractors rarely acknowledge. These posts are far less desirable now. Yet for all their imperfections, board members typically are a theater's biggest individual donors.

By no means can all of the problems be laid at theater's own door. Big tech has made home entertainment immersive, audiences struggle now to turn off their phones (a real problem), and new competition, not least from theatrically savvy bars and restaurants, is everywhere. TikTok serves up seemingly free content that precisely matches a consumer's subconscious desires; no theater can (or would) target like that. And younger audiences often come with less arts education than previous generations and thus less of an immediately shared language.

There also are success stories and theaters bucking the trend. Hit shows at all levels and loyal audience members are still there. And, for sure, negativity can be self-fulfilling.

It's clear that the relationship between institutions and the freelance artists on whom they rely must be healed. And that's going to be hard.

Most U.S. theaters (unlike major orchestras and many European companies) don't permanently employ actors or designers and often have no more than one director. Thus freelance, unionized artists feel only limited loyalty to institutions and are free to raise their voices in opposition to them, as many have. Moreover, compensation for these theater artists historically has been poor in Chicago, to say the least. This is a systemic problem; that $117 million that went into new buildings could, after all, have gone into artists' salaries.

Except, of course, that is not how the real world works. New buildings are more appealing than operating expenses, both to public and private funders. That's why Lookingglass is able to renovate its space even as it struggles to afford to program anything there. (It's also why we have new stations yet few trains.)

From its conception, the regional theater movement was organized around artistic directors and artistic homes: one well-paid, talented person whose taste and guidance was thought able to lead an entire community. These leaders often sought new buildings, which became markers of achievement in an industry where permanence inherently is elusive.

The best artistic directors have been justly beloved, allowing artists and audiences to participate in the unfolding of a great, decades-long vision, wrought alongside partners and changing with the times. But younger artists have now resoundingly rejected that model, a consequence in part of the nation's broader ideological and generational splintering. And while you can do theater without buildings, you cannot do it without artists.

Simply put, the theater has to face these uncomfortable truths and sort itself out internally before it can expect to thrive again. That requires some drastic change from what has of late been a rudderless Chicago theater community, lacking in bold, public-facing leadership. One helpful model is the restaurant industry, which has a powerful lobby and typically presents a united front to its customers and the politicians on whom it relies for help. Chicago theater now needs to focus more on its audience, both present and aspirational.

For their part, though, those who have long loved Chicago theater now have to decide how much they value what has been one of the city's greatest assets and reason itself to choose to live here. There is much on the line. And greater attendance would help, to say the least.

One truth above all else calls for support, tolerance and understanding on all sides. Long characterized by passion, dedication and commitment, Chicago theaters were hit hard by a pandemic that unleashed chaos and trauma and that no one could ever have predicted.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic. cjones5@chicagotribune.com

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Column: What happened to theater in Chicago?

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Theater in both Chicago and America has changed so much since 2019, it is almost unrecognizable. A long list of our storefront companies have closed.

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Decomposition Instead of Collapse - Dear Theatre, Be Like Soil

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Co-signed by Lauren Halvorsen and edited by Regina Victor. With thanks to Stephanie Ybarra for always daring me to speak my ideas - Annalisa Dias Editors note: This eco-driven essay urges us ...

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Boards Are Broken, So Let's Break and Remake Them

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Nonprofit theatre boards are unrepresentative, out of touch, and more often oppressive than supportive. We can and must do this better.

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2024 Anti-Trans Bills: Trans Legislation Tracker

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2024 anti-trans bills tracker. Explore data on U.S. anti-trans legislation including passed bills and themes including sports, bathrooms, healthcare, pronouns, drag shows, and education.

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More on a universal charitable deduction

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More on a universal charitable deduction

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Advocacy Issue Center - PerformingArtsAlliance

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Side view of Arena Stage from Maine Avenue in D.C. in 2010. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

In just the past few months, major regional theaters in Chicago and Los Angeles have suspended performances until at least next year, while New York's famed Public Theater canceled its beloved Under the Radar festival and laid off 19 percent of its staff.

These losses and many others have inspired renewed calls for the government to save America's nonprofit professional theaters. What strikes me about these calls isn't that they've been sounded time and again to no avail. It's that there are still people who believe that these institutions - struggling in cities big and small across the country - should be rescued in their current form.

That's not to say the government shouldn't fund the arts. Of course it should, especially in times of profound crisis such as these. Art is a vital national concern: It gives us meaning. It's the food of the soul. And we're going to need well-fed souls in the years ahead.

But too many theaters have ceased to serve this function. The closings, cancellations and plummeting ticket sales - only worsened by the pandemic - attest to that. Theater leaders should read the writing on the wall instead of continuing to beat on a closed door.

American theater will always exist; only its forms will change. And the dominant nonprofit model is neither necessary nor even traditional. It's a recent invention. In the early 1960s, the Ford Foundation began funding regional theaters with a dual mission: to make theater available to audiences outside New York and to provide artistic homes for playwrights, directors, actors and designers. A few years later, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) stepped in to boost funding. In 1965, there were 56 nonprofit theaters; by 2000, there were 340 - six times as many.

These theaters became the major - virtually only - route for theater artists to make a living outside Broadway or academia. The handful of artistic directors who ran them became the de facto curators of theatrical culture in most of America.

Well into the new century, these theaters continued to expand, encouraged by wealthy donors and boards. In 2006, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis moved into a grand, $125 million complex. Four years later, Arena Stage opened its 200,000-square-foot, $135 million Mead Center in Southwest D.C. As recently as 2021, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago completed a $73 million "urban theater campus." Smaller theaters followed suit, with the same assumption: that physical size provided stability.

Meanwhile, however, an insidious feedback loop was taking hold. The bigger theaters got, the more assets they had to maintain, the more administrators they had to pay, the more capital campaigns they had to launch, the more debt they had to take on and the more seats they had to fill to break even. But as the NEA noted in a 2008 report, ticket sales were declining. Size no longer meant stability, but liability.

When the bubbles began bursting, artists were the first to take the hit. As pandemic lockdowns closed theaters temporarily, most companies prioritized saving their buildings and their administrators' salaries over funding their artists.

Among the artists I know, this was heartbreaking but not surprising. Artists are treated as an afterthought by the leaders of the field - mere assets to be secured, like a prop or a gel.A recent review in American Theatre sourced predictions for the field entirely from administrators, executives, donors, fundraisers and audience members. Artists themselves weren't even mentioned - how they envision the future of theater, how they're surviving, or even whether they're surviving.

Now, those same theaters are closing buildings, canceling seasons or holding emergency fundraisers - without questioning whether the economic model itself is just or sustainable. It's neither.

For theater as we know it to have any future at all, a new economic model must take its place, founded on a simple principle: Fund artists directly. Then let the artists produce their own work, rent their own venues and pay their own collaborators.

This would be revolutionary. Consider that, during the covid-19 pandemic, when spaces were largely closed down, Milwaukee Rep, a midsize professional nonprofit theater, paid its artistic director $273,843 (out of a budget of $8 million), while the Public paid its director $888,676 (out of a budget of $37 million).

To put these numbers in perspective, I come from a background where we regularly put on plays for $10,000 to $15,000. We frequently sold out our runs - all three of my first plays in Durham, N.C., sold out, or nearly so. We always paid everyone something. Double that budget to $30,000, and we could have paid well. Extrapolate that into the millions, and hundreds of artists could have been writing and producing their own work - and paying their collaborators directly during quarantine.

That would have been just in one city, during one year - at a time when we were desperate for art that radically responded to our current moment.

It's true that scaling down would mean prioritizing certain kinds of theater over others. But this is the case in every era: Some aesthetics thrive while others die out. Instead of a world in which you pay astronomical prices to see another tired revival from the mezzanine, imagine there are a dozen theater cells in your area, performing new work in backyards and parks and city squares and empty storefronts. Art that is fresh, fluid, immediate, accessible and affordable - to make and to see - all because we collectively decided to fund the artists directly. That's the future I want. I can live without million-dollar rotating sets.

Is there any place for existing nonprofit theaters in this model? Sure. Reshape them into direct granting agencies and public resources somewhat like libraries, offering artists and companies production slots on a lottery basis. It does mean that audience members and funders, large and small, public and private, will need to understand that bigger doesn't mean better; adaptable means better, and adaptable usually means smaller. It would also mean that existing artistic directors understand that not only are they not the ordained curators of culture, but they are useful to the art form only insofar as they serve artists - the creators of the form.

The professional nonprofit model is killing the form it was supposed to sustain.

But theater will survive and could even bloom into a renaissance - if we start funding theater artists directly. The writing on the wall has always been clear: Artists are the ones who find new ways forward in times of change. That's our job. We innovate. Let us.

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Opinion | Why theater (in its current form) does not deserve to be saved

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American theater is struggling to stay alive. Only artists can revive it.

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It's been a difficult summer for the nonprofit performing arts field. In mid-June, L.A.'s Center Theatre Group (CTG) announced that it was indefinitely pausing shows at the Mark Taper Forum. A week later, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) laid off 13% of its staff and reduced its programming in an effort to plug a "sizable structural deficit."

Like countless other performing arts organizations, the CTG and BAM are attempting to balance the books at a time when in-person attendance hasn't returned to pre-pandemic levels, and that's just one of their many problems.

"What we're dealing with now is not one economic shock but a series of compounding crises," said Theatre Communications Group Executive Director Teresa Eyring in an email to IP. "The ongoing impacts of COVID-19 have intensified pre-existing challenges, including the decline of the subscription model and persistently negative working capital" and "inflation and rising labor costs have made everything more expensive."

In previous downturns, leaders turned to donors to plug the gaps. Now, they're up against two formidable obstacles. The first, according to an L.A. Times article on the forum's struggles, is "hesitant, recession-wary donors." Compounding matters is the fact that organizations are engaging a dwindling number of donors. In a statement to the New York Times, BAM President Gina Duncan said that changes were necessary to help the organization "address an outdated business model that heavily relies on a shrinking donor base."

The traditional fundraising-during-a-downturn playbook calls on organizations to lean on mega-donors when everyday givers step back and the broader pool shrinks. But this isn't your parents' downturn. As far as the theater field specifically is concerned, TCG's "Theatre Facts" report found that trustee giving dropped 26% during the first full year of the pandemic, and according to Eyring and Mid Atlantic Arts Director of Programs Robyn Busch, conditions on the ground haven't substantially improved.

It's not all bad news, however. Private support helped many organizations stave off closure over the past three years, and just as encouragingly, a post-pandemic playbook is emerging to help leaders navigate the rough waters ahead. "When theaters match rigorous relationship building across departments and a detailed analysis of patron behavior to mission-driven programming," Eyring said, "they can succeed with recession-wary donors."
Not your parents' downturn
The pandemic accelerated trends that were already in motion across the performing arts space, such as the growing popularity of streaming entertainment, shrinking attendance, and a reliance on an outdated subscriber model. The crisis, Busch said via an email to IP, "was yet another setback to an industry and art form constantly adapting in the face of negligible public funding."

Fundraisers instinctively seek guidance by comparing the situation at hand with previous downturns, but the pandemic rendered the existing playbook meaningless. TCG's "Theatre Facts" shows that the one-year, field-wide average decline in total ticket income was 10.7% after 9/11 and 7.3% for the Great Recession. After the first year of pandemic-induced shuttered performances, the drop was 88%. The only bright spot is that TCG found that 22% of organizations that produced work through digital, outdoor or socially distanced means saw a smaller, 28.9% decline in total ticket income.

As for donors' response to previous crises, trustee and non-trustee giving rose 41.5% and 68.2%, respectively, within the year after 9/11, while in the first year of the Great Recession's impact, trustee giving dropped 8% and giving from other individuals rose 2.4%. In contrast, trustee giving, as noted, declined 26% in the first full year of the pandemic and contributed income from other individuals dropped 7%. "We can see that donors have tended to stay committed or even rally historic levels of donation in past crises, but not so during the worst of COVID-19," Eyring said.

In 2021, Congress made matters worse by allowing the universal charitable deduction, which incentivized non-itemizing taxpayers to donate, to expire. "Given that the majority of tax filers do not itemize, it seems clear that this temporary program was successful," said New England Foundation for the Arts Communications Director Ann Wicks in an email to IP. Both she and Eyring noted that their organizations are encouraging Congress to pass the Charitable Act, which would reinstate a universal charitable deduction for 2023 and 2024.

Add it all up, and TCG's Theatre Facts found a 14.6% reduction in the total number of donors from 2017 to 2021. "Paired with the downward trends in subscribers, it does seem that our nonprofit theatre ecology is mirroring the shrinking donor base for charitable giving overall," Eyring said.
Mark Taper Forum: A case study
Diminished aggregate giving and a shrinking donor base have traditionally accentuated the importance of mega-donor giving. But the pandemic showed that it doesn't necessarily follow that "top-of-the-pyramid" givers will publicly rescue the organization from financial ruin.

We saw this dynamic play out with the Mark Taper Forum where, according to Gelt, "some theater leaders said confidentially that Center Theatre Group should have called on the financial heft of its well-connected board to fund the completion of an all-important season for female and BIPOC writers." While we don't know what board members were thinking in the run-up to the forum's closure, I suspect some of them concluded that a heroic bailout wasn't a pragmatic or financially viable option.

The L.A. Times reported that "corporate contributions and individual donations - which constitute 20% to 30% of the budget - are down about one-fifth compared with pre-pandemic giving." Based on the group's average annual budget of $63 million, back-of-the-envelope calculations show that the CTG was looking at a shortfall of incoming contributions of about $3 million - not an insurmountable number for deep-pocketed trustees.

But of course, organizations rely on other incoming revenue streams. Ticket sales, which account for about 70% of CTG's budget, "are only about 70% of what they were in 2019 across all three of CTG's stages," according to the L.A. Times. As a result, CTG is $12 million to $13 million in the red. Getting trustees to chip in for even half of that amount is a pretty big ask.
Engaging recession-wary donors
Three years after the pandemic, donors are skittish due to fears of a recession that hasn't materialized and that some market watchers now say may never come to pass. Eyring said that theaters can most effectively engage them by "taking holistic, relational and cross-departmental approaches to developing strong relationships with their communities."

She stressed that organizations must rekindle an authentic and personal approach, citing Classical Theatre of Harlem Artistic Director Ty Jones, who "addresses the audience after each performance and recognizes special supporters who are in the house," and invest in front-of-house and box office staff to create a welcoming and inclusive environment. This outreach needs to be supplemented with rigorous analysis of patron behavior so leaders can design engagement campaigns based on hard data. (I encourage leaders seeking out additional guidance on this point to check out the Wallace Foundation's Building Audiences for Sustainability case studies.)

While making audiences and donors feel appreciated doesn't require organizations to spend an extra dime, the old adage "you have to spend money to raise money" still applies for those that can afford it. Eyring said best-in-class organizations are investing in their marketing and development staff, which, as TCG's 2022 Salary Survey suggests, experience the highest levels of staff turnover at theaters. As one would expect, this constant churn makes it difficult for organizations to build long-term relationships with donors.

The other big piece in organizations' donor engagement calculus is leaders' attention to mission, which, according to Eyring, "remains the primary motivator for giving." Theatre Facts 2021 looked at how Cleveland's Karamu House, whose mission honors the Black experience, more than doubled giving from trustees and individual donors over a five-year period by recommitting its programming to its social justice roots.
Calling all theater people
Looking ahead, the good news is that performing arts fundraisers are operating in a climate where 72% of Americans believe the arts "unify our communities regardless of age, race and ethnicity," Erying said. The real work will come in the figurative trenches - making visitors feel welcome, collecting and analyzing behavioral data, leaning into the organization's mission and creating demographically targeted engagement campaigns.

This latter activity will be especially important as baby boomers make way for Generation X and millennials who, unlike their generational predecessors, are more inclined to view the arts experience through the lens of advancing social change. "It seems likely that there is a general shift underway, but we're still trying to understand its full impact on donor bases," Erying said.

Mega-donors need to be part of the contributed revenue mix. "Organizations will need donors to step up to plug the gaps and theater makers will need to continue to be innovative in their approach to programming and income streams,"Busch said, while noting that "an overreliance on any one income stream, be it audiences or donors, is too risky of an approach given the economy and political climate." In addition, playwright Jeremy O. Harris told Gelt that some theaters have shown a penchant for funding expensive building projects, "making companies increasingly dependent on the whims of wealthy, often out-of-touch board members," Gelt wrote.

Lastly, a top-heavy approach could alienate everyday donors who feel that organizations are beholden to their affluent patrons. But research from the Center for Effective Philanthropy showed that organizations that received huge gifts from MacKenzie Scott didn't see a drop-off in aggregate funding. In fact, some recipients leveraged her support to generate add-on funding from everyday donors.

Of course, all of this prognosticating is moot if audiences don't return to pre-pandemic levels of in-person performances. Eyring encourages readers who have been touched by the power of theater to "see a show, subscribe or become a member at your favorite theaters, and if you can donate to their vital work. Our theaters are resilient, but the compounding crises we're facing are severe, and we need theater people everywhere to show their support."

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"A Series of Compounding Crises." The State of Post-Pandemic Theater Fundraising | Inside Philanthropy

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Three years after the pandemic, audiences haven't returned to live theater en masse and donors are wary of a recession. Theatre Communications Group Executive Director Teresa Eyring and other leaders help us navigate a fraught landscape.

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Opinion | American Theater Is Imploding Before Our Eyes

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Government bailouts saved the automotive and banking industries. American theater is in similar trouble and deserves to be saved.

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​​​​​​​Before the COVID-19 pandemic, theater companies were already concerned about how to get more people in seats. Worries about declining ticket sales and audience retention, on top of economic inflation, have grown even more urgent as performances have safely come back to the stage, but audiences haven't returned to pre-pandemic levels.

"The key question is, what are the things that are being done in order to emerge from the pandemic in a sustainable way," Teresa Eyring, Executive Director of Theatre Communications Group, said in an interview with NPR earlier this year. We caught up with her to learn more about the creative and innovative solutions that theaters around the country have implemented to address shrinking budgets, accessibility, and audience churn.

This post is the first of an occasional series of conversations with professionals and leaders in the performing arts to help understand the current issues facing the industry and the creative efforts organizations have undertaken in this new environment.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Wallace Foundation: What are some of the specific challenges theaters and performing arts organizations are facing right now, three years after the initial impact of COVID?

Teresa Eyring: While the initial impact of the pandemic was immense, with our Theatre Facts 2021 report revealing an 88 percent one-year drop in total ticket income, a combination of historic federal relief funds and adaptive resilience largely saw theaters through. Now, with those relief funds ending, our theater ecology is facing a series of compounding challenges, many of which predated the pandemic but have been accelerated by it.

Those challenges include the cost of inflation; shuttered performances from the pandemic and climate crisis; conflict between staff and board; staff burnout and hiring difficulties; anti-trans and LGBTQ+ laws; and increasing violence against marginalized communities. On top of all of this, many theaters continue to struggle with the return of audiences.

WF: How has audience behavior (ticket-buying, attendance, desire for in-person vs. virtual programs, etc.) changed over the course of the pandemic to now?

TE: What we're seeing is that the pandemic has accelerated pre-existing shifts in audience behavior. The gradual decline of subscriptions has intensified, though they remain an important part of the earned income puzzle. The dominance of streaming entertainment continues to grow, with ongoing pandemic fears and the rise of remote work conspiring to keep people at home.

While many theaters pivoted to digital during the worst of the pandemic, only a smaller number continue to invest significantly in digital. Yet we know from Slover Linett's Rethinking Relevance report that audiences who prefer digital are, on average, more likely to be BIPOC and/or disabled. Theaters seeking to diversify their audiences may want to invest in digital, especially considering the 'distance cost​'​ that many theaters experience when trying to attract audiences outside of their immediate areas.

The concept of "churn"-the difficulty in getting new-to-file audience members to return a second or third time-has been discussed in almost every working group meeting that we've held for folks in the industry. According to Spektrix's Inflation, Epidemics and Audience Loyalty: Arts Marketing in 2023, in 2018 only 26 percent of audiences were returning annually, down from 35 percent in 2005. This year, our speakers have reported churn rates as high as 90 percent. As with most of the challenges listed above, the pandemic has exacerbated the already daunting hurdle of audience retention.

WF: Can you share any examples of performing arts organizations that have deployed a successful strategy to attract audiences?

TE: Theaters that invested in digital programming during the pandemic fared better than those that went entirely dark. Theatre Facts 2021 revealed a subset of outliers that increased their attendance during the 2020-21 season through digital programming, and these theaters, such as Teatro Vista (Chicago, IL), collectively saw a 28.9 percent total ticket income decline-significantly less than the 88 percent for all theaters.

This positive trend has continued for the smaller number of theaters who've continued to invest in digital access. Know Theatre (Cincinnati, OH) and Wilma Theater (Philadelphia, PA) both make significant revenue from their online streaming access-nearly 10 percent and between 10-25 percent, respectively. These productions have artistic value, as well-Wilma Theater's digital production of Fat Ham led to the play being awarded the Pulitzer Prize before it had ever received a live production.

Also, the rise of the flexible loyalty model is a sometimes radical way for theaters to encourage audience retention; whether they're called memberships, choose-your-own subscriptions, or as Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Washington, DC) has it, a Golden Ticket granting holders entry to every show Woolly produces. Similarly, ZACH Theatre's (Austin, TX) ZACH XP is an all-access membership to unlimited shows and events. In other words, a Golden Ticket or ZACH XP holder could see any show they wanted as many times as they wanted whenever they wanted-about as close to the flexibility and simplicity of a streaming platform like Netflix as any live, in-person performance can get.

The importance of compelling programming has only increased as the rise of quality streaming competes for audience attention. Portland Center Stage (Portland, OR) noted that starting their season with a big musical has served as a "springboard for both single and subscription ticket sales, and attracts new audiences." Similarly, African-American Shakespeare Company (San Francisco, CA) shared how their beloved annual production of Cinderella continues to be a gateway production for their work as a whole.

Theaters are also producing new work that attracts robust audiences by presenting familiar and local stories, such as Miami New Drama's (Miami, FL) productions about the Elián González custody battle or the notorious Miami cartel godmother, Griselda Ayala.

WF: How about examples of strategies that organizations are deploying to bring audiences back to their theaters?

TE: Children's Theatre Company (Minneapolis, MN) engaged a cross-departmental task force to identify who their new-to-file patrons were, and what segmented approaches might best persuade them to return. This work led to epiphanies such as the increased 'stickiness' of patrons who engaged with their education programs. These patrons were far more likely to return to CTC in the near term. Ballet Austin (Austin, TX) has already seen significant progress by segmenting their audience after an analysis of their single ticket sales revealed that more patrons were returning than they'd realized. What's more, if they could encourage their audiences to return three times over 18 months-the 'magic three,' as they called it-then "we had them for life." Based on these analyses, they created unique marketing approaches and front-of-house experiences that significantly increased retention.

The importance of an enhanced front-of-house experience was underscored by multiple theaters in our working groups. Portland Center Stage shifted to a patron services model in 2016-where every subscriber has a dedicated person in the box office-and their surveys consistently receive positive feedback.

While none of these strategies are entirely new, what is different now is the scale of urgency and experimentation. With more challenging years ahead, theaters will need to continue data-driven experimentation to build on what works in a rapidly shifting environment.

WF: During the pandemic, we sometimes saw the link between arts and culture organizations and communities become even stronger. Is this something you've seen in the theater industry? Or are there any other positive changes that you've witnessed in the theater landscape over the past few years?

TE: Yes, and when it comes to community orientation, Black, Indigenous, Theaters of Color (BITOC) have continued to lead the way. Zannie Voss's findings from The Alchemy of High-Performing Arts Organizations, Part II: A Spotlight on Organizations of Color really synthesizes so much of what we've learned through our decades-long work with BITOC, including our current THRIVE! Program. One notable example is Penumbra Theatre's (Saint Paul, MN) expansion into a Center for Racial Healing. Their president Sarah Bellamy asks, "What if there were one place where you could witness art that fires your imagination, healing practices that restore your sense of balance and possibility, and trainings that could equip you to stand powerfully for social progress?"

There are so many more inspiring examples of BITOC serving their communities in abundant, expansive ways:

New Native Theatre (Saint Paul, MN) hosts Two-Spirit Powwows that include mutual aid distribution of food and clothing

When TeAda Productions (Los Angeles, CA) traveled to Micronesia to continue their longstanding collaboration with Micronesian artists, they raised funds to bring mosquito nets and tarps with them.

El Teatro Campesino (​​San Juan Bautista, CA) leads annual Día de los Muertos processions

Karamu Playhouse (Cleveland, OH) leads annual Second Line parades, taking to the streets of their communities.

When Typhoon Mawar struck Guam, Breaking Wave Theatre Company organized ways to support the island's recovery. Junebug Productions's Junebug Juke Joints bring pop-up parties celebrating Black joy and Black to Black-owned spots across New Orleans.

One last major positive change to note from the pandemic is the ongoing uprisings for racial justice and care-centered processes. From the #WeSeeYouWAT demands to the Bay Area's collective of theatermakers working on transformative justice, movement-building for accountability and abundance within the theater sector has taken deep root and there is no going back.

WF: What are some key lessons or takeaways for organizations still struggling?

TE: Simply put: you are not alone, and we're stronger together. People can sign up for our Theater Leader Connectedness meetings and our online Circle listservs or join our Working Groups for Audiences and our Theater for Activism series. Every week, we're connecting theater people across the country with the resources and relationships they need to thrive.

Beyond that, this moment calls for fractal thinking, meaning: we've heard time and time again that theater people are burnt out and overwhelmed. Almost nobody feels like they have the time or the bandwidth to make major changes-yet major changes are exactly what's needed to meet the challenges of the moment. That's why making smaller, replicable changes that, over time, can yield radical transformation offers so much promise. If you're struggling with dwindling subscribers, try out a simpler, more flexible package for a season. If churn is an issue, experiment with sustained, segmented follow-up messages for a production. If your staff continues to turn over rapidly, commit to a trial run of meeting-free days to reduce burnout.

Above all, give yourself and those around you grace. We've witnessed far too many artists and theater leaders burning out, leaving their institutions or the field all together. We need to practice self and collective care to get through these years of crisis and chrysalis. If we can, we'll surely come out the other side stronger than before.
Following the success of "Rest Up," a virtual gathering to strengthen theater's self and collective care practices, TCG's continuing the series over the next year with "Charge Up" this fall and "Rise Up" in June 2024 at their National Conference in Chicago.

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Three Years After Pandemic, Theaters Still Navigate Uncertain Waters

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Executive Director of Theatre Communications Group shares the struggles and triumphs of theaters across the country in bringing their audiences back

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Six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald was the star attraction at Long Wharf Theatre's annual benefit concert in May. (Chike Photography for Lotta Studio)

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - For more than 55 years, the highly regarded Long Wharf Theatre made its home in a converted warehouse in an old food terminal near New Haven Harbor. Then one day last year, with rent payments an escalating burden, the company became homeless.

Is a legacy theater company without its theater still a company? It's a proposition that Long Wharf's artistic director, Jacob G. Padrón, has been testing - an "itinerant" theater model - and the rest of the anxiety-ridden theater world is watching closely. Still reeling from the pandemic, many of the country's nonprofit theaters of various sizes are in deep financial trouble, in what is rapidly turning into the most severe crisis in the 70-year history of the regional theater movement.

"It's happening more and more and more, and it's going to be an epidemic," said Michael M. Kaiser, former president of the Kennedy Center and now chairman of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland. "I've always believed that we were heading for a time that we were going to lose a whole lot of midsized cultural organizations. And I still believe that's true."

Evidence of the turmoil mounts day by day, as companies from California to New York announce major cutbacks in their offerings - or shut down altogether. The theater world was further rocked recently when one of the nation's largest companies, the Los Angeles-based Center Theatre Group, said it would "pause" programming in one of its theaters, the Mark Taper Forum. That followed the upheaval at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, another industry mainstay, which said last month it needed an emergency infusion of $7.5 million or its 2023 season could not go on. The urgent effort came after a similar plea, in April, for which OSF raised $2.5 million.

The cutbacks and closings have been so regular of late that a document circulates among leaders of the field, listing recent "permanent closures" - such as Triad Stage in North Carolina, Southern Repertory Theatre in New Orleans, New Ohio Theatre in New York - and staff and program downsizings. In June, off-Broadway's Public Theater eliminated its Under the Radar Festival, which set an industry standard for avant-garde and international plays. To save money, even august companies such as Arena Stage - working with what its leaders call "deficit planning" - are reducing the number of plays they produce.

And just last week, Chicago's 35-year-old Lookingglass Theatre Company, debut theater for Tony-winning director Mary Zimmerman's "Metamorphoses," declared that it was ceasing operations until late next spring. As regional theaters often are the seeding ground for both new-play development and work that eventually goes to Broadway, every "pause" can have consequences down the road.

The crisis is a perfect storm of bad economic and demographic trends, exacerbated by a change in cultural habits during the pandemic. Experts in theater management say that 25 percent to 30 percent of theater audiences have not returned since the pandemic shutdown of March 2020 that lasted until late 2021. Retrenchment has continued, they say, not so much out of lingering fears of getting sick, but because theater simply receded as a priority as other pastimes filled the gap. Streaming entertainment at home, for example, has proved a durable substitute for the time and expense of theater.

No one cause completely explains the situation, but many theaters have been slow to respond to changes in the marketplace. Billions in federal aid - including the $15 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program approved in 2020 - kept theaters afloat during the shutdown. But that cushion was temporary. The money was largely spent, observers say, but problems from before the pandemic, such as a continual decline in season subscriptions, have not been adequately addressed.

The Broadway musical "Come From Away," a show about strangers coming together on 9/11, returned to the theater on Sept. 21, 2021 after pausing for the pandemic. (Video: Allie Caren/The Washington Post)

The confluence has theater business professionals issuing dire warnings.

"By this time next year, I think the industry will shrink by half," said Amy Wratchford, who has been managing director of theaters in Virginia and is now president of the Wratchford Group, an arts management consultancy.

Wratchford added that "donor fatigue" - a reluctance by some financial supporters to continue to shore up struggling institutions - has been settling in. (Unlike commercial Broadway shows, whose investors optimally expect a profit, the nation's regional theaters operate on a nonprofit basis, deriving income from ticket sales, grants from philanthropies and donations from individuals.)

"What we've got," she said, "is a disconnect between theater and the people who fund it."

Kaiser, whose institute counsels hundreds of arts organizations across the country, believes that some theaters, motivated by honorable concerns about social and racial justice, pivoted in their programming too abruptly after the shutdown.

He called the move "a change of perspective in what stories they want to tell without necessarily bringing their audiences or their donors or their boards along with them, in a way that makes clear as to why this is important and how to participate and how to watch. And as a result, I think we're seeing some serious loss of audience and board support and donor support."

Although a few companies folded in the wake of the pandemic, it was Long Wharf's announcement in February 2022 of a radical new direction that was the industry's real wake-up call. A strong artistic force for decades, Long Wharf has championed such playwrights as David Rabe and Margaret Edson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for "Wit," which got a crucial early boost at Long Wharf. But time and declining attendance caught up with the organization: By the point at which Padrón and Kit Ingui became artistic director and managing director in 2019, its 400-seat main stage theater was typically less than half filled, and the building was desperately in need of upgrades.

"When I got here, financial challenges were already in existence for Long Wharf over the course of more than a decade," Ingui said in an interview in the downtown office suite that now serves as company headquarters. "There were severe deficits."

With an operating budget of about $4 million, and facing increases that would put annual rent at about $500,000, something drastic had to be done. "The board recognized that the building and the expense and the operations were not sustainable," Padrón said. "It just wasn't good anymore.

"So we had to figure out a different way," he added. "We know that it is such a risk. But we also know that great things don't come without taking risks."

The "great thing" Padrón had in mind was potentially exciting but also deeply upsetting to some longtime Long Wharf patrons: giving up the building and finding spaces for productions in and around New Haven. The Yale-trained Padrón, 43, a California native who grew up on shows at Luis Valdez's storied El Teatro Campesino, founded for farmworkers, is part of a generation of younger theater leaders more committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. He envisioned Long Wharf expanding its reach to underserved communities.

That has meant offerings such as "Black Trans Women at the Center," a multiyear digital festival of new work, and "I AM: Muslim/American," a film by Aaliyah Miller and Halima Flynn that Long Wharf has taken for talkback sessions across Connecticut. The itinerant era also birthed a concert reading in September of the Broadway musical "Jelly's Last Jam" in a space in the city's Dixwell neighborhood.

There is no shortage of potential sites for the company's projects - the staff has toured more than 60 in the area. This fall, actress Kathleen Chalfant will perform Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" in private homes in the New Haven area. And while the new team has been able to erase the company's deficit, the unknown is whether Long Wharf can hold on to its position as a strong cultural influence and attract the new audiences it seeks.

The company's board of directors is solidly behind the gamble.

"We had to make some kind of decision, were we going to stay or leave the financial model? That subscription model is absolutely failing," said board chair Nancy Alexander, herself a consultant to nonprofit organizations. "And so the financial model, which was based largely on that, was starting to crumble. But the really positive and very important factor was our desire to make theater for everyone."

The hope for some struggling companies is that reducing programming for a time - and thus the pressure on the budget - will allow them to re-energize. Meghan Pressman, Centre Theatre Group's managing director and chief executive, said pausing work in the Mark Taper allows time for "a restructuring, a rebalancing," as a new artistic director, Snehal Desai, takes over this summer. (The company is still presenting musicals in its larger Ahmanson Theatre.)

Pressman acknowledges that the industry came up short in the effort to lure audiences back after the pandemic. "We bet big on the past year and half," she said, adding that perhaps a public airing of theater's dire straits will let reluctant theatergoers know how desperately they are needed to return.

"That is one of the only positive outcomes out of this really distressing moment," Pressman said. "If it throws a spotlight on the struggle over what is happening, then I am proud to be of service."

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Theater is in freefall, and the pandemic isn't the only thing to blame

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Companies are closing, seasons have been truncated and in New Haven, a revered company is pivoting after giving up its own stage.

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The last time American theatres faced a crisis of contraction anything like the one they're facing now-with significant layoffs at New York City's Public Theater and Dallas Theater Center, season "pauses" at L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum and Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre Company, emergency fundraising at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Westport Country Playhouse, not to mention a cascade of closures ( detailed below)-it was in the midst of the Great Recession that began in 2008. A previous dip was felt after the 9/11 attacks, particularly in New York City. Before that, in the early 1990s, a downturn in theatre activity was linked not only to economic recession but to the retreat of federal arts funding in the face of sustained political attack.

Now, despite some puzzling economic signals and real inflationary pressures, and despite our ongoing commitment to Ukraine's defense, the U.S. is decidedly neither in a recession nor a war. So why has our theatre field contracted so precipitously in the past few months, with casualties recorded at every kind of theatre-children's companies, experimental storefronts, LORT powerhouses, midsize performing arts centers, destination theatres-while at the same time many theatres, and not just on Broadway, continue to post encouraging box-office numbers and seem to be carrying on more or less as before? Is it all down to the rocky recovery of live audiences after COVID closures? To programming that audiences are rejecting or indifferent to? To inherent problems in the nonprofit business model, or faulty management practices? To drops in donated income from governments, foundations, corporations, and individual donors?

These aren't just academic questions, of course, but practical and existential ones for theatres pondering anew not only how to make theatre but who they're making it for and why. The full answers to these questions will be as complicated and various as the nation's theatres. But a few generalizations can be ventured. First, it is clear that the contraction we're seeing now actually started last summer-or, more precisely, it could be said that last year's return to full, post-reopening programming after two years of closure was not in fact full at all. Based on our own data, gathered for last fall's season listings, TCG member theatres programmed about 40 percent fewer shows in 2022-23 than they had in the 2019-20 season. A new chart from a study by JCA, an arts marketing firm, shows this disparity starkly. While ticket revenue and audience capacity has bounced nearly fully back for the shows on offer, the inventory of shows and performances is down by almost exactly the same number we recorded last fall:

A field that is putting that much less work onstage-and we have reason to believe that the number of shows slated for the 2023-24 season is unlikely to be much bigger, and may possibly be even smaller-is by definition a shrinking field. And so a lot of the contraction we're seeing is a kind of brutal right-sizing, resulting in layoffs, cancellations, and closures that will have recessionary ripple effects on local economies everywhere from Ashland, Ore., to Brooklyn, not to mention giving a brimming national talent pool fewer entry points.

But if theatres are responding rationally to a drop in demand with a commensurate drop in supply, that doesn't answer the question of why audience demand fell off a cliff. Zannie Voss, who as director of SMU DataArts studies audience trends, told me that a key difference between this crisis and the Great Recession of the late 2000s is that then, "People were still going about their daily lives and holding on to most of their habits, even if they didn't have as much cash to spend. The pandemic was a hard stop button on life. And over the course of two years, people changed their habits, their behaviors, their preferences, and the way they consume arts and culture. It's a shift in consumer behavior."

Jill Robinson at TRG Arts, an arts analysis and consultancy firm, broadly concurred.

"What's different from the Great Recession is that, in that case, ticket buying came back pretty quickly, though philanthropy was hit really hard at that time," said Robinson, whose recent data also show that donations to theatres are down by as much as 40 percent this past spring from pre-pandemic levels. Though Robinson said she was reluctant to generalize about what was making the difference between struggling and thriving theatres, she ventured that too many theatres "allowed the engine to stall" during the COVID shutdown, meaning their engagement with subscribers, donors, and community partners. "If you think about databases as a revenue engine, the longer we let those stale out, the harder it's going to be to reignite it. And theatres let that stale out, in the macro view, longer than other genres did."

It's definitely true that live music revenues surged back stronger than ever (and pointedly, earlier than theatres reopened), even as streaming options made staying home all the more appealing. While the appeal of couch-surfing Netflix et al. over leaving home has been reiterated ad nauseam, Alan Brown of WolfBrown, an arts research and planning consultancy for nonprofits, put a finer point on it.

"When you think of all the popular, excellent drama on television, that is potentially sating public interest in drama," said Brown. "So the real question is, if you define yourself as being about buying tickets and sitting down and shutting up and watching live drama-it's just not mapping to the ideal experience of what younger people want to do in their precious entertainment time."

Most of these researchers and consultants corroborated what we've been hearing anecdotally for the past year: that when audiences do consider going to the theatre, by and large they are craving fun, diversion, celebration, spectacle-uniquely theatrical material they can't get easily at home. Of course, these criteria can mean many different things to different theatregoers. So in the next section we'll drill down on the highly contested question of what role programming is playing in theatres' relative success or failure. Next we'll consider the state of fundraising, particularly at theatres doing it on an emergency, "save our theatre" footing. Then we'll look at whether the entire nonprofit business model needs an overhaul, and if so, what the alternatives are.

And we'll close with a forward-looking note, because as difficult as this moment is for specific theatres and theatre workers, live theatre as an art form is not in danger of disappearing from the face of the earth, as theatres all over the country are proving every night (and afternoon). Figuring out what forms this shape-shifting practice will take next-and who will get to make and enjoy it-has always been the work of this magazine, and will continue to be as long as folks gather in person to entertain each other.

Get With the Program

In conversations in recent months with theatre leaders, we've heard a few consistent refrains about how the 2022-23 season played out. The most common takeaway: Holiday shows killed at the box office last December. We repeatedly heard phrases like "highest-grossing in the theatre's history." This confirms not only the general sense that audiences are mostly craving comfort and joy, but also the grim reality that last winter was the first in three years that didn't see a COVID surge.

We also heard about some other bright spots: that familiar titles like Clue did well at the box office (not for nothing was it one of last season's most-produced plays), but also that some newer plays caught on with audiences via word of mouth. The leaders of Atlanta's Alliance Theatre recently hailed their successful A Christmas Carol but also told us that Katori Hall's Pulitzer-winning The Hot Wing King was a box-office hit in February. The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis reported a similar pattern with their Christmas Carol and their February show, Dominique Morisseau's Confederates.

Arena Stage's Molly Smith said in a recent interview that the highs and lows of the past year have been "extreme. It's either a boffo hit, with tons and tons of people, or it's small audiences. You have something like Ride the Cyclone that just did gangbusters, and extended by a couple of weeks; American Prophet did the same. And then there were two other shows that were good shows-but they weren't events. That seems to be the thing that's drawing people out of their pajamas right now."

It's not as if experimental work isn't thriving in the right environment: At New York City's Soho Rep, their spring show Public Obscenities, a new multilingual play by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, extended several times and had standby lines down the street every night (and recently announced presentations at D.C.'s Woolly Mammoth and Brooklyn's Theatre for a New Audience). That may be why recently departed Soho Rep artistic director Sarah Benson could confidently claim, in a New York Times exit interview, "People want to see ambitious work and things they haven't seen before. They want to be challenged."

One strain of criticism you'll hear from some audience members and critics about the current crisis is that too many theatres have prioritized racial diversity in their programming in recent years, and so theatre's predominantly white audiences are voting with their feet because they don't want to go to the theatre to be "lectured" about injustice (bad news for Brecht, Ibsen, Boal, Odets, or Miller, but that may be an argument for another day). Leaving aside that this critique has little to say about the raft of shuttered theatres compiled at the end of this piece (was Bay Area Children's Theatre's programming too "woke"?), it is true that some theatres may have moved into this work a bit ham-handedly. As SMU's Zannie Voss put it, "The whole racial justice movement of the past few years brought a hard light to the fact that there hasn't been enough diverse programming over the past decade. So you can say, 'Okay, all of a sudden, we're going to do diverse programming,' and hope to just add water and everyone will come. But it's like a friendship-it takes time and trust."

At the Bay Area's California Shakespeare Theatre, which opted to pause productions in 2023 but has several ambitious recovery plans in the works (detailed in the next section), executive director Clive Worsley did concede that "some legacy diehard Shakespeare audience members weren't willing to come along for the ride to a more diverse casting and/or politically relevant or perhaps even politically charged adaptations." But he affirmed the theatre's commitment to diverse programming on pragmatic terms as much as principled ones. "I think that there will always be some relevance for Shakespeare," he said, "but not enough in and of itself to float an organization of this size."

Where's the Money

Almost by definition, nonprofit theatres rely to varying degrees on donated income, even in the best of times. During the COVID shutdown, they received generous relief funding even as their expenses were down, as they weren't producing. According to TCG's Budgeting for Uncertainty: Snapshot Survey 2022, 97 percent of responding theatres applied for and received at least one form of federal relief funds from initiatives such as the Paycheck Protection Program, Employee Retention Tax Credits, CARES Act, Shuttered Venue Operators Grants, American Rescue Plan, and Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program. It is worth noting that some of these programs restricted the use of funds to operations expenses. Also worth noting: Theatres saw a 46 percent drop in expenses from 2017 to 2021, and "positive bottom lines were heavily influenced by contributed and investment revenue, with strong increases in government support," according to TCG's 2021 Theatre Facts Report. During this time, non-trustee individuals and foundations were the largest sources of contributed revenue, nearly equivalent to state, federal, and local funding combined.

A comparison to the aftermath of the 2009 recession is instructive: The 2009 Theatre Facts report indicated a 9.7 percent growth in expenses from 2005 to 2009, while theatres saw significant capital losses from endowments and other investments. Though contributed income was at a five-year high in 2009, it did not provide enough of a boost to offset the decline in earned income and growth in expenses. 60 percent of theatres averaged negative profits in 2009.

That was, in short, a more conventional downturn, from which most theatres eventually recovered. By contrast, the COVID shutdown, with its combination of relief funding and drastically reduced programming, was more like the calm before a brewing storm. In the past year, theatres have ramped up production, now subject to new inflationary and labor challenges, just as relief funds have run out and audiences' preferences have changed. In this context, it's not hard to understand the financial pressures that have caused many theatres to close, pause, or in some cases, run emergency "save our stages" campaigns.

Among them are OSF's $7.3 million "The Show Must Go On" effort, launched on the heels of its last artistic director's departure and now running concurrently with the current five-show season, or the Mark Taper Forum's full stop to raise funds for a 2024-25 season. Connecticut's Westport Country Playhouse is currently in the process of a $2 million fundraising campaign, while also preparing for a leadership transition as Mark Shanahan succeeds Mark Lamos as artistic director next March. Like many theatres around the U.S., the company has had to lay off staff and pare down its programming calendar.

As of last week, Westport told us they were approximately 20 percent of the way toward accomplishing their fundraising goal, with major gifts conversations underway that could push the needle in a positive direction. Still, interim managing director Gretchen Wright admitted, "We might not even get through the next three weeks. We have no cash reserves. We basically have a fixed amount of money in the bank that's just getting smaller and smaller. Unless some of these major gifts come through, we will reach a point of maybe needing to pause operation. We're kind of at a critical, short-term crisis, with some optimism in the longer-term view. Things look brighter going into 2024, but right now-we might run out of money in a couple of weeks."

In the meantime, Westport is committed to broadening the playhouse's offerings beyond traditional live theatre productions, including readings and one-night only shows like comedy, conversations, and concerts.

"It's a financial decision, but also the board is shifting the identity of the organization and the model to be more of a hybrid presenting and producing model," said Wright. "So there's a better balance of revenue and expense, as far as how we're using our space and what we're putting onstage. The pandemic kind of exacerbated the realities, but we had declining audiences for several years prior to 2020. There was a need for some new ways of programming here. We kind of had to hit rock bottom in order to realize that we had to completely change how we do what we do."

Westport surveyed its audiences, asking what would bring them back to the theatre. "Instead of seeking buy-in from them, we've heard what they want, and so now we're adjusting accordingly," said Wright. "We're trying to give our community what they want, because we feel that's the only thing that's getting the theatre going in the short term."

Still, she explained that even with a more efficient model, fundraising has been a challenge.

"We had a big drop-off in corporate support that started in 2020," she said. "It's been a struggle to bring that back up. Other institutional support for us was typically tied to programming. The more programming we've cut, the harder it's been to get funding from those organizations. I feel that many of them were happy to convert a grant to general operating during the pandemic, but I think that trend is changing. They want money to go to programs, and they're kind of tired of converting it for canceled programming."

In collaboration with six other regional theatres in Connecticut, Westport was able to lobby the state government for some small additional grants. The playhouse is also still waiting to receive an employee-retention credit, but that is expected to be the last of the relief funding. At this point, Westport's future hangs in the balance.

Another company in regrouping mode is the California Shakespeare Theater, which opted to suspend in-house productions in 2023. But the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater won't be dark for long. When managing director Sarah Williams stepped down in fall 2022, the company seriously considered closure. Then former director of artistic learning Clive Worsley returned to become executive director and offered the theatre another option, based on work that was already happening.

"In 2021, we produced one production of our own, and in 2022, we produced two productions of our own," explained Worsley, "and the rest of the calendar was opened up to other groups to come and perform under what was called a Shared Light Initiative, where other performing arts organizations in and around the Bay Area were invited to produce their work on our stage for little or no fee."

Worsley cited theatre companies in the Bay Area that are keeping costs down by sharing patron services, software, IT personnel, and activities. The Cal Shakes scene shop is building sets for Berkeley Playhouse, Shotgun Players, American Conservatory Theater, and other theatre companies. This arrangement not only saves those companies money; it's also generating revenue that will make it possible for Cal Shakes to produce a marquee production for its 50th anniversary in 2024.

"The idea is that we become a multidisciplinary performing arts venue," said Worsley, "with Cal Shakes as the resident theatre company at the center of it. Our education programs will continue as before. We will make the space available to other performing arts groups to share the space with their audience, and merge our audiences, and we will also do straight-up revenue-positive rental activities."

As for the theatre's fundraising approach, Worsley said, "It's almost as though what we are right now is a startup, and we are actively going out and looking for capital for this startup."

This crisis, unfortunately, intersects with larger changes in arts funding patterns. A study by the Arts Funders Forum showed changes in giving behaviors with a "rising generation of donors." As Forum director Melissa Cowley Wolf put it in a 2020 op-ed, these donors are increasingly "skeptical about the power of the arts to create a better world. Research shows that many of these funders prioritize advancing social, racial, environmental justice and equity; they seek specific, measurable impact; and they embrace technology to solve the pressing issues of our day."

To recapture these donors, Wolf recommends that arts organizations change the conversation around fundraising to reflect their specific core values, and to take a more active, mission-oriented approach to addressing structural inequities in the field.

This generational shift comes as the nonprofit sector struggles to contend with an overall reduction in donors. Donor participation fell in five out of the last six quarters, particularly among new donors, with a 10 percent decline recorded in 2022, according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project's Q4 report. This has caused a reliance on large donations from repeat donors. Calls for renewed federal funding, even a bailout for the theatre industry, have also been heard, though it is hard to imagine the current U.S. Congress considering this seriously.

Surveying this aspect of the crisis, TRG's Jill Robinson said, "It's a long game. It's expensive to create new customers for any business, and we have to create funders who are interested in helping make that happen." Considering CTG's decision to pause production at the Mark Taper Forum for a full season and raise money, she said, "I can't even imagine how hard that is in this environment. To say, 'Listen, we need to take a beat-we're committed, but we've got to have the financial plans to be able to do this kind of work.' I think that's an inspiration, not a failure. This political environment is becoming more open to having the real conversation right now about, what is it going to take to keep the doors open? It takes courageous leaders who say, 'We've got to have financial plans for the next five or 10 years, not for the next 60 days.'"

This Year's Model

Of course, an effort to bail out theatres as they've run for decades side-steps the larger question of whether the nonprofit business model itself is sustainable or in need of a root-and-branch overhaul. When Mara Isaacs left the nonprofit sector to found Octopus Theatricals 10 years ago, it was in no small part because, as she said in a recent interview, "The writing was on the wall" for the business model undergirding the nation's nonprofit theatres. The structure around how theatre does business, how it funds its work, how it connects to its community, and how it is valued in the larger society simply hasn't evolved or developed at the same pace as the industries around it.

"I think the business model is severely broken, and it hasn't changed much in the last 75 years," echoed Michael Bobbitt, who also left theatre leadership behind him to serve as executive director for Mass Cultural Council. "There are many strained business models out there, but theatres might be the most strained of my arts organizations."

Bobbitt said moving to a state agency has helped give him a broader perspective of the issues facing theatre since his days in the thick of things (he formerly served as artistic director of the New Repertory Theatre in Watertown, Mass., and of Adventure Theatre-MTC in Maryland). As he considered the issues facing theatre's business model, he pointed to a conundrum that has challenged organizations from Wiliamstown Theatre Festival to the storefront theatres of Chicago: In the last few years, the industry has pushed for overdue corrections around racial equity, labor, artist treatment, and hiring practices. "All of that added expenses and none of it brought in more revenue," he said. "So we put more pressure on our theatre companies, more strain on the business."

To be fair, Bobbitt noted that the nonprofit arts sector across the board is financially unstable-this isn't just a theatre problem. That's why, when he looks for solutions and alternatives to the way theatre does business, his eyes turn toward industries outside the sector. Bobbitt said that when he was leading arts organizations, he wouldn't look to other arts organizations when trying to find remedies to declining subscription numbers. Instead he would eye patron loyalty programs at hotels or airlines, ice cream parlors or coffee shops, zoos or aquariums, to see what he might learn.

In another example, he pointed to the corporate world and wondered if theatres could be more nimble, stepping away from annual budgeting and focusing on a quarterly budget so that annual planning could potentially be more of a roadmap than a requirement.

"We're asking our artistic directors to program seasons that are six months to 18 months in the future," Bobbitt said. "It doesn't leave any room for flexibility. It doesn't leave us any room to respond to what's happening in the world. The world is moving way too fast for us to do that kind of programming."

He pointed to his own past frustrations directing or choreographing a show late in a theatre's season, worried that a rough first half of the season might result in a theatre's board pushing to cut expenses, thus threatening the quality of the late-season work. Of course, Bobbitt acknowledged that this temporal shift in thinking would bring its own complications, especially when it comes to securing artists, but he wonders if it might also open the door to a more sustainable way to do theatre. Such a move, Bobbitt ventured, might also open the door for nonprofits to follow a successful habit of the for-profit theatre world-i.e., letting a successful show keep chugging along without the theatre being beholden to their subscription promises.

For her part, Isaacs said she wouldn't want to see nonprofits follow too closely in the footsteps of commercial theatre, or to scale back to the point of hyper-focusing on the box-office success or failure of one show after another. She said she can already feel "a real risk aversion now in institutions, because there is so much at stake." This is happening at a time when Isaacs said she's seeing more and more audiences wanting to curate their own experience; they are increasingly looking for some kind of "guarantee of experience" rather than risk or experimentation. It's an impulse that can feel antithetical to offering the public a well-curated, year-long vision of a sole artistic director-another model whose time may have passed.

With ticket prices that have historically priced people out, and COVID-era forays into streaming or virtual theatre offerings that were all too quickly abandoned, nonprofits still struggle to reach audiences.

"The pandemic has been an accelerant, but it is not the cause," Isaacs said. "For whatever reason, our society at large doesn't value what the arts can do for its communities in the way that I think it used to."

League of Chicago Theatres executive director Marissa Lynn Ford said the importance of theatre to the community "needs to be reiterated over and over again." She pointed to theatres impacting the world around them beyond the shows that wind up onstage, be that through educational and other community-centered programming or offerings like training courses for businesses.

As part of her own research, Isaacs has begun looking into the history and reasoning behind 501(c)(3) and why the system is set up the way it is. While she wasn't quite ready to share her findings, she did point to the role of nonprofit boards. With financial pressures mounting on theatres, boards have become fundraising boards, she observed, rather than the ideal she envisions: a group who is there to protect the mission of the organization, a mission that should be intrinsically tied to the theatre's community.

"I think that we're actually at the dawn of a major crisis," Bobbitt said. "These theatres that have closed or ceased programming, that's the beginning. If we don't act now, and we don't act collectively..."

Bobbitt cut himself off. In 2021, for this publication, Bobbitt wrote about the problem with nonprofit boards, laying out not just the issues with them but potential solutions or approaches for the future. Originally he thought only a handful of folks would read it, but, reflecting more recently, he couldn't believe how massive the response was as the field reckoned with his thoughts.

"Yet we haven't done much about it," Bobbitt conceded.

That seems to be how it goes. Changes, as even Bobbitt observed, have been happening via small conversations, which have led to some theatres tinkering at the margins. But widespread action remains elusive. Even, or perhaps especially, at a time of risk aversion, there's value in those risk takers, Isaacs said. There need to be some theatres who try something new, who may become the inspiration other theatres around the country may need-or the cautionary tale that leads others to make improvement.

"One of the challenges is that the people who are actually in action don't have time to do blog posts," Isaacs said. "Maybe the people you want to hear from are not the people who are raising their hand to speak, because they're actually in the trenches trying to figure it out."

So what is the venue for these conversations, and how can those learnings be turned into action on a large scale?

"We need collective impact work," Bobbitt said. "We need to get together as a sector and hash this out, but we need to hash it out with other people-economists and futurists and entrepreneurs and people that really think about building businesses that are sustainable, who spend all their time working on this kind of stuff. We haven't figured it out in our sector. We've been tweaking and tweaking and tweaking but having the same result. Now we're seeing theatres closing. We need to ask for help."

Light a Candle

As we've been compiling this feature and the listing of closed companies and programs below, season listings have been pouring in for the 2023-24 at TCG member theatres. If you're looking for an antidote to despair about the state of the field, you could do worse than take a look through these listings -still in progress as of this writing, but growing in size and scope every day. They paint an incomplete but encouraging picture of a field that is home to a mix of ambition and tradition, new and old, familiar and fantastical.

One particular bright spot we've noticed: multigenerational and TYA programming. These are worth doing for their own sake, of course, but they also promise long-tail impact. As Peter Brosius, outgoing artistic director of Minneapolis's Children's Theatre Company, told us recently, "People are hungry to provide opportunities for their kids, so our education programs are going gangbusters-they're selling out faster than ever." And he made a familiar point with fresh urgency, looking out at a struggling field and noting "the number of regionals who are beginning to make multigenerational programming a part of their life, because they realize that the single best way to build the audience of the future is to start people when they're young. It's not gambling. It's bloody simple. All the studies show that people who have been exposed to the arts and had deep arts experiences when they're young are so much more likely to engage the arts as audiences, as practitioners, as donors, as patrons, as board members, as staff, than those who haven't. So we literally see our work not so much as making plays but as sort of guaranteeing a future for the American theatre."

Indeed, for all the challenges of the present moment, one pressing question for the future is the extent to which theatres are expanding and nourishing audiences and creative talents of tomorrow. A few signal examples can provide an inspiration and a model. At Chicago Children's Theatre (CCT), the Red Kite Project houses numerous programs for kids with autism, developmental disabilities, and other accessibility needs, as well as for their families. Founded by CCT artistic director Jacqueline Russell, Red Kite is not an afterthought or add-on but is central to CCT's very founding and mission-"the heart of the company," as Russell put it.

While many theatres struggle to retain and serve existing audiences, Russell said she spends much of her energy "really trying to convince people that they are welcome here, and we want you here, and there is something for you here. I think there's a big hesitation from a lot of families that their kid will be too much...We're seeing families that would like to participate but don't know if they can."

Red Kite, which remained busy reaching kids both in Chicago and all over the country during the shutdown, has had no shortage of support for their work as they've returned to in-person performance, including funding that has enabled Sam Mauceri, CCT's current director of education and access programs, to manage the Red Kite Project full-time. With initiatives like a three-week summer Camp Red Kite, weekly after-school classes, and multi-sensory interactive performances that go to parks, libraries and community centers, they have watched kids grow into adults in their programs, even experience true belonging for the first time.

Russell shared, "When we did our first Red Kite performance, we mailed invitations to all the kids in our classroom, and we invited them to come to this performance, and they were the very first audience to see it. This mother came up to me, and she said, 'My son is 9 and this is the first invitation he's ever received-to do anything.' It was so meaningful for them to receive an invitation with his name on it. I never forget that, and I am just very proud of this work because I think every child should get that feeling. And we're just gonna keep doing that till we get all those kids to come and party with us in this city."

Meanwhile, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Kelsey Mesa, manager of Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) and Theater Education, said she has "a lot of faith in the future of theatre in the United States, because this next generation of creatives coming up is something special." Indeed, it may be little known that the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival is the prestigious center's oldest program, predating even its impressive building.

The festival serves eight U.S. regions with around 600 colleges and universities, assembling a cohort of young designers and directors, as well as Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship candidates, for professional development opportunities. Having worked at Kennedy Center for 15 years, Mesa has come across plenty of trailblazers. She cites Austin Dean Ashford, an artist known widely for his work as a musician, writer, and performer who experiments with different mediums; current theatre management MFA candidate Roman Sanchez, an alum through Aspire Arts Leadership, who founded Lime Arts in 2016; and Sis Thee Doll, a powerhouse performer and activist who went from being a KCACTF directing fellow to starring in the recent Oklahoma! Tour as Ado Annie and leading the Trans March on Broadway in 2021. Mesa said, "I have learned from Sis that she puts a lot of energy into activism because she needs to make space for herself in the theatre. We do not have a theatre landscape that has space for everyone. There are people who are not automatically included. It can be hard for people to put so much energy into fighting to just be there when they could be making art."

Reflecting on the current moment of crisis, Mesa said, "It's a crumbling of the institution, and it hurts, if you have hung your hat on the institution. It might be seismic. But theatre is not buildings. Theatre is the people, and the people are still gonna be here. So when I think about the challenges, I also think that we can play the long game. We can invest in the next generation in whatever little ways we can. We can advocate for arts education in our schools, and we can support education and outreach programs at theatres. By prioritizing those things, I think the future will be brighter."

As we began this piece with a chart from the JCA arts marketing firm, we will close with another, showing that more than half of audiences who've come back to theatres in the past year are new to the theatre:

Half of an already reduced number of theatregoers is obviously not yet cause for rejoicing. But it's something to build on.

At Arkansas's TheatreSquared, managing director Martin Miller presided over a pandemic-era theatre success story, building a new facility and getting national attention with a live simulcast of Designing Women and a co-production of the online play Russian Troll Farm (which garnered the first Obie Award for an Arkansas theatre). But as Miller transitions to the same title at Princeton's McCarter Theatre Center, the state of the field is much on his mind. He contrasted the current theatre crisis with so many of the rolling disasters we face today, which can make us feel relatively powerless.

"How do we get the bees back? Or what's going on with wildfires in Canada? You can't personally go up there and put out the fire," Miller said. "But when it comes to the crisis in theatre, the solution is in everybody's hands. I'm not trying to take the responsibility for that solution out of the province of the people making theatre, but people who love it and want to give companies the space to figure out what this next chapter is should drop off a check at their local theatre company, even if they didn't love the last show. And then they should go and see a play, and then go and see another one."

Closures Since March 2020
The following list does not include the many theatres that have reduced, cut back, relocated, or paused operations, most of which (but ) are covered in the story above. Berwyn, Ill., 2007-2022
16th Street Theater

Who they were: The only professional theatre in Berwyn, and a program of the North Berwyn Park District, 16th Street operated with a budget of over $200,000 pre-pandemic and performed mainly out of a 49-seat basement theatre space in the North Berwyn Cultural Center.

Reason for closure: The company did not immediately give a reason for the company's closure, which came just over a year after founding artistic director Ann Filmer left the company. In a statement, the 16th Street board said, "We are no longer a program of, or in any way associated with, the North Berwyn Park District. The North Berwyn Park District is the sole owner of the name '16th Street Theater,' and plans to create a children's theatre with that name at some point in the future." Prior to the company's closure, the theatre had been working with the Park District on a move to a former Veterans of Foreign Wars post, which Filmer had previously said was purchased for the company by the Park District. In an interview with the Tribune, interim artistic director Jean Gottlieb said, "The Park District now wants to go in a different direction."
Charlotte, N.C., 1989-2022
Actor's Theatre of Charlotte

Who they were: Founded in 1989, Actor's Theatre of Charlotte's mission was to produce new works by contemporary playwrights. The company's original uptown location was demolished in 2016 to make way for an apartment building. ATC found a new home at Queen's University, but the venue was unavailable for the 2022-23 season. Its budget as of that year was around $795,000.

Kind of work they did: ATC presented revivals and new works confronting major issues facing the city of Charlotte, including gentrification, class mobility, and race. Notable productions included Fun Home and Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill. ATC complemented its tougher works with crowd-pleasers like Rock of Ages and Silence! The Musical.

Reason for closure: In a letter to subscribers, executive director Laura Rice cited "the continuing effects COVID-19 has had on performing arts operations such as ATC, disappointing ticket and subscription sales, and recent news that ATC would be seeking another performance venue." Challenges in finding a new venue in Charlotte, where development is increasingly focused on business over venue spaces, proved the last straw for an already strained organization.
Chicago, 2008-2023
AstonRep Theatre Company

Who they were: Over the years, AstonRep performed at various venues around Chicago, including the Edge Theatre's 104-seat proscenium theatre and black box theatre, and Raven Theatre's 56-seat Schwartz Stage, among other small rental venues.

Reason for closure: When AstonRep announced its 2022-23 season, it presented this 15th season of producing theatre in the city as its last. In a recent interview, founder Robert Tobin said, "The last two, three years have become very tough for a number of factors," including becoming more difficult to raise money. Though running a storefront in Chicago, especially over the last few years, was challenging, Tobin said it was also rewarding. Ultimately, Tobin said, "We just decided 15 years was a good number, and maybe it was time to move on."
Atlanta, 1980-2023
Atlanta Lyric Theatre

Who they were: Founded in 1980 as the Southeastern Savoyards, an operetta repertory company, the Lyric was the only professional musical theatre company in Atlanta until 2016. Since 2013 the company made its home at the Jennie T. Anderson Theatre on the Cobb Civic Center Complex, a 600-seat venue which, prior to the pandemic, the Lyric regularly sold out.

Kind of work they did: The Lyric presented Broadway standards, from My Fair Lady to Rent, as well as lesser-known musicals like The IT Girl. They also collaborated with the Jennie T. Anderson Theatre on drive-ins, festivals, and one-night concerts. Many young performers got Equity cards through Lyric productions, while Broadway talent would sometimes come out to Atlanta for a Lyric run.

Reason for closure: The Lyric closed in March, citing financial strain and insufficient funding to either complete its 42nd season or embark on a 43rd. Confronted with these financial challenges alongside dwindling audience numbers, the Lyric's board voted to dissolve the organization. Remaining productions in the season, including Pippin, were canceled. Frequent performer Galen Crawley told : "It is heartbreaking that the board would vote to dissolve instead of mounting a capital campaign or signaling, in some way, that they needed help."
Oakland, Calif., 2007-2022
Bay Area Children's Theatre

Who they were: Founded and run by Nina Meehan for most of its run, the theatre had a budget of approximately $750,000 as of 2021, a year after Khalia Davis was named artistic director. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that BATC had hoped to raise as much by the new fiscal year on July 1 with their Save Our Stage campaign, which they announced in early May.

Kind of work they did: As their name suggests, Bay Area Children's Theatre staged Theatre for Young Audiences shows and other family-friendly fare. They were known for adapting popular children's books for the stage, including The Very Hungry Caterpillar. They also produced shows targeted for the interests (and attention spans) of toddlers and ran robust youth arts education programs.

Reason for closure: The theatre announced their abrupt and immediate closure on May 17, reporting that patron donations for the Save Our Stage campaign were insufficient to cover the theatre's operating costs due to "growing, insurmountable financial burdens" (and despite the fact that their 2022 ticket sales were up 9 percent from 2019). Like many theatres that have closed or paused programming, BATC cited the financial impact of the COVID shutdown in their decision. Christina Clark Bloodgood, the outgoing board president, told the Chronicle's Lily Janiak that many Bay Area actors the company relied upon had been priced out of the area and now required the theatre to pay to house them.
Great Barrington, Mass., 2007-2021
Berkshire Playwrights Lab

Who they were: Founded by Joe Cacaci, Jim Frangione, Bob Jaffe, and Matthew Penn, Berkshire Playwrights Lab provided opportunities for writers to encourage, develop, and present new plays. A Staged Reading Series gave playwrights an intensive four-day rehearsal process ahead of a free public reading. BLP also launched the Radius Playwrights Festival and the Berkshire Voices program to cultivate and encourage theatrical talent in the local area.

Kind of work they did: BPL developed work by acclaimed playwright James Anthony Tyler and produced his play Some Old Black Man in New York in 2018. (Tyler also became a co-artistic director of the festival.) The festival also developed Jane Anderson's Mother of the Maid, which was then produced by Shakespeare & Co. in Massachusetts and the Public Theater in a production starring Glenn Close.

Reason for closure: BPL presented a virtual festival in 2020 but remained dark in 2021. The festival was unable to remain financially viable without resuming full operations, and announced its closure later in 2021.
Chicago, 2003-2023
BoHo Theatre

Who they were: With a typical storefront model, BoHo staged works in rental venues like the Edge Theater. In pre-pandemic times, their season featured between three and five mainstage productions plus special events.

Kind of work they did: Inspired by the bohemian pillars, BoHo facilitated a warm, family-friendly atmosphere in both process and product, producing both established musicals like Big Fish and new plays by emerging writers.

Reason for closure: BoHo had already called off spring 2023 programming, but realized after a January board meeting that they would not be able to secure the funds to both sustain a theatre season and pay workers beyond 2023. The company closed after investigating many options (which included downsizing the season and merging with another nonprofit).
Seattle, 1990-2023
Book-It Repertory Theatre

Who they were: Founded in 1990 by co-artistic directors Jane Jones and Myra Platt, Book-It transformed literature into theatre. Their productions reached 60,000 K-12 students in Washington schools annually. Their budget last year was nearly $1.6 million.

Kind of work they did: Book-It employed a unique style of theatrical production, with the text of literary works spoken as well as staged, and prose narration recited by actors alongside a character's dialogue. The company adapted countless classic novels, including Moby-Dick, Pride and Prejudice and Howards End. Book-It also adapted contemporary novels by local authors. Book-It's final production was David Greig's adaptation of Solaris, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem.

Reason for closure: Book-It announced that it had ceased operations in June. Founders Jones and Platt had stepped down in 2020 to make way for new leadership, and a number of personnel changes followed: managing director Kayti Barnett-O'Brien left in 2022, and new artistic director Gus Meaneary announced his own departure in April. Interim artistic director Kelly Kitchens and Book-It's board determined that decreased ticket sales, limited individual giving, and increased production costs made future seasons unfeasible. "We all still believe in the art form and can't help but hope that we will see a show in the Book-It narrative style on a Seattle stage again," board secretary Becky Monk said.
San Francisco, 1983-2022
EXIT Theatre

Who they were: EXIT Theatre was born when founding artistic director Christina Augello staged a new play in a hotel lobby in the Tenderloin neighborhood, casting locals from the area. Though EXIT grew and came to operate two venues in San Francisco, it always retained an experimental focus, providing a home for vaudevillians, improvisers, and magicians. Walking in to EXIT on a given night, you might find a play to your left and a burlesque show to the right.

Kind of work they did: San Francisco Chronicle theatre critic Lily Janiak praised the company's "devotion to the new and the now, the weird, and the wild." Significant productions have included works by resident playwright Sean Owens including Odd By Nature and Naught But Pirates, and Waiting for FEMA by Karen Ripley and Annie Larson. EXIT also founded the annual San Francisco Fringe Festival in 1992, and its sister venue still hosts the festival annually.

Reason for closure: EXIT closed its flagship venue on Eddy Street in 2022 due to rising costs and shrinking audiences post-reopening. Augello moved north to Arcata and now programs out of a 35-seat space, another EXIT outpost, and a sister venue Exit on Taylor remains open, subleased to other companies with the exception of the Fringe Festival, still hosted at Taylor, for which Augello returns to San Francisco to program. This year's festival runs Aug. 10-26.
Oak Brook/Chicago, 1997-2023
First Folio Theatre

Who they were: Known for performing in the impressive Mayslake Peabody Estate, First Folio offered " high-quality performances to the Chicagoland suburbs " with attention to audience experience. As of 2021, their budget was close to $255,000.

Kind of work they did: First Folio began to fill a gap in directing opportunities for women and non-musical theatre work. In the summers, Shakespeare productions would draw artists and audiences to their outdoor venue, but their indoor space featured both contemporary and classical works year-round.

Reason for closure: In late 2021, First Folio shared plans for a 2024 closure, with co-founder and executive director David Rice citing financial trouble sustaining a full-time staff and being eligible for Chicago theatre grants. But early 2023 brought compounded difficulties that led them to cancel their final productions.
San Francisco, 1998-2021
foolsFURY

Who they were: As its name may indicate, foolsFURY was an adventurous company focused on ensemble-oriented experimental work. The troupe produced both original works and deconstructed classics, and allowed its artists longer periods of development, inviting audiences into the process and showing works at various stages of development. SF Arts Monthly once hailed the company as "one of the brightest stars of the San Francisco experimental theatre scene."

Kind of work they did: foolsFURY first garnered wide attention with the world premiere of Monster in the Dark by Doug Dorst in 2008, a co-production with Berkeley-based Shotgun Players. It was followed the next year with the U.S. premiere of Fabrice Melquiot's The Devil on All Sides, which toured from San Francisco to Performance Space New York (formerly P.S. 122). foolsFURY has supported many new playwrights through new commissions, including Sheila Callaghan, Katie Pearl, Angela Santillo, and Kate Tarker.

Reason for closure: foolsFURY cited multiple factors in its decision to close: the 2020 departure of founding artistic director Ben Yalom, the 2020 wildfires that destroyed the Sonoma County home and artist retreat center of current artistic director Debórah Eliezer, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which destabilized the small and nomadic company's infrastructure. foolsFury's "Legacy Project," a thorough archive of the company's work and history, is now available on the company's website.
Chicago, 2001-2022
House Theatre

Who they were: Founded by creatives from Southern Methodist University and the British American Drama Academy, this ensemble-based theatre was known for critically acclaimed, risk-taking adaptations and new work. After 2021, the company had planned to execute a much-anticipated anti-racist action plan.

Kind of work they did: A Chicago staple, the company memorably staged Death and Harry Houdini, The Terrible Tragedy of Peter Pan, The Hammer Trinity, United Flight 232, and more. Countless artists in the area had crossed paths with this company.

Reason for closure: Board president Renee Duba's statement read, "We did not have the financial momentum or audience/donor support to continue beyond this fiscal year. We chose instead to maximize our current year programming and to honor all present commitments and partnerships with a thoughtfully planned exit from the Chicago theatre scene."
Louisville, 1976-2021
Humana Festival of New American Plays

Who they were: Founded in 1976 by director Jon Jory, the Humana Festival of New American Plays was a world-renowned festival presented by Actors Theatre of Louisville which celebrated the contemporary American playwright. It was sponsored by Humana, a health insurance company based in Louisville, starting in 1979. A wide array of world premieres, usually six to 10 plays, were presented over multiple weeks in a flurry of new work which attracted artistic leaders from around the world to Louisville.

Kind of work they did: Humana hosted premieres by Will Eno, Sarah Ruhl, David Marguiles, Beth Henley, and Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins. Many Humana premieres went on to major productions and significant acclaim, such as Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo and The Christians by Lucas Hnath. Obie-winning director Les Waters ran the Actors Theatre and curated the festival 2012-2018.

Reason for closure: The Humana Festival was canceled in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, then presented in virtual form in 2021. In March 2022, Actors Theatre confirmed the festival would not be held that year, citing a need to "reimagine a 21st-century model that is sustainable, equitable, and radically accessible," according to artistic director Robert Barry Fleming. Humana confirmed that their funding relationship with Actors Theatre had ended. Fleming said the festival could return in a different form, but that Actors Theatre was focused on year-round new-play development programs.
Chicago, 2010-2023
Interrobang Theatre Project

Who they were: With a pre-pandemic budget of around $70,000, Interrobang was in residence at Chicago's Rivendell Theatre, performing in Rivendell's 50-seat black box theatre.

Reason for closure: In a statement announcing the end of the company's run, Interrobang cited "a shrinking board, staff, and ensemble due to pandemic-related pivots, hiring challenges, and shifting expectations surrounding pay and sustainability."
New York City, 1994-2021
The Lark

Who they were: Formerly Lark Play Development Center, the Lark was an international theatre laboratory dedicated to discovering and developing playwrights. Founded by John Clinton Eisner, the Lark sought to nurture American and international artists at all career stages by providing resources such as money, space, collaborators, audiences, professional connections, and the freedom to design their own processes of exploration. As of 2022, the Lark had an approximate budget of $1,371,708.

Kind of work they did: The Lark hosted the Playwrights' Week new work festival, various writers' retreats, workshops, readings, roundtables, fellowships, and international exchange programs. It sought to be an artistic home for new voices and new ideas.

Reason for closure: According to a statement from Oct. 2021, the Lark board of directors voted unanimously to end operations citing "no sustainable and viable path forward" for the organization financially. The Lark's financial model depended almost entirely on individual and institutional giving. Members of the playwriting community, including former director of development Nora Brigid Monahan, questioned the board's account, referencing issues of mismanagement, neglect, and gaslighting, as well as conflicts between the board and artists. Several of the Lark's key programs were rehomed to other theatres.
New York City, 1995-2022
Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab

Who they were: The Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab was a developmental program for stage directors from around the country and the world. Founded by former LCT dramaturg Anne Cattaneo, the Lab combined approaches from directing, dramaturgy, different types of work, and different cultures. Intentionally non-academic, the Lab was geared toward professional directors in early career stages and was free of charge. Members were accepted based on the stories and ideas written in applications. More than 1,600 directors went through the program.

Kind of work they did: The Lab was an intensive, six-day-a-week, 10-hour-a-day, three-week program of workshops, shared sessions, rehearsals, investigations, theatregoing, and discussions with accomplished and well-known artists. The LCT Directors Lab was nominated twice for a Tony Award. The Lab had sister programs based in the North, West, and Mediterranean regions, as well as in Chicago.

Reason for closure: After the last gathering of the Lab in 2019, Cattaneo was planning a 2020 iteration, then scotched by COVID. The Lab's offices never reopened, she said, and in 2022, considering among other issues the Trump Administration's travel policies, which complicated access for international directors, she decided to retire. LCT has said that they intend to continue the Lab's work in some form in the future.
Rancho Cucamonga, 2006-2020
MainStreet Theatre Co.

Who they were: MainStreet Theatre Company presented theatre for young audiences at the City of Rancho Cucamonga's Lewis Family Playhouse for 14 years. Led by Mireya Hepner, the company's founder and sole employee, MainStreet was heralded for mature, artfully crafted productions which "happened to be stories kids could come to," as Hepner put it. Shows starred Equity actors and were directed/designed by respected "adult" theater artists from the area.

Kind of work they did: MainStreet shows were typically adapted from popular children's book titles. Notable productions included A Wrinkle in Time, Miss Nelson Is Missing, new play Aesop in Rancho Cucamonga and the company's final production, And Then They Came Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank. Hepner's work aimed to never talk down to young audiences-programming was challenging and talkbacks ensured kids engaged deeply with the questions raised by each show.

Reason for closure: Hepner was technically an employee of the City of Rancho Cucamonga, which operated MainStreet's former venue, and her position was eliminated by the city in May 2020 as part of cuts forced by the Covid-19 shutdown. At the time, the City Council stated that the theatre was not dissolved and would return at some point, but it currently remains inactive.
New York City, 1993-2023
Metropolitan Playhouse

Who they were: Since 1993, Metropolitan Playhouse has presented small-scale productions along with readings, workshops, and chamber concerts, becoming a modest Off-Off-Broadway institution. The company brought renewed attention to over 100 forgotten American plays. Since 1997, Metropolitan Playhouse has made its home in a 51-seat theatre on the second floor of the Cornelia Connelly Center in the East Village. The company received a 2011 Obie grant from The Village Voice and a 2014 Outstanding Performing Arts Group Award from the Victorian Society of New York.

Kind of work they did: Metropolitan Playhouse's first production was Dion Boucicault's rarely revived melodrama The Poor of New York. Beginning in 2001, each season tackled a particular theme: Faith, Starting Over, The American Dream, etc. The Playhouse operated under the Equity Showcase Code, which permits brief runs for minimal compensation. The theatre placed particular focus on its neighborhood's culture and history, presenting the Alphabet City Monologues (based on interviews with the theatre's neighbors) and the East Village Chronicles (one-act plays inspired by the area).

Reason for closure: Producing artistic director Alex Roe stated that the Playhouse had "reached the limits inherent in a company of our small size, and it is time to draw the curtain." Roe left the door open to future productions based on a different funding model. For now the theatre will focus on creating an easily accessible online archive of their history.
Chicago, 2008-2023
The New Coordinates

Who they were: Formerly known as The New Colony, The New Coordinates didn't have a permanent home and innovated modalities to accommodate new-work development pre-, during, and post-pandemic. They were known for gathering writers everywhere from a bar to the Den Theatre.

Kind of work they did: With every production slot reserved for new work created from scratch, their mission emphasized newness in the makeup of art, artists, and audiences.

Reason for closure: After a challenging year of not finding financial footing in the return to in-person programming, former co-artistic director Fin Coe lamented that the company had to cancel its final production a week before tech. In retrospect, he wishes that smaller companies had clearer pathways to survive, grants had fewer applicant limitations, and TNC had cultivated stronger ties with its location/community.
New York City, 1993-2023
New Ohio Theatre

Who they were: A supporter and presenter of New York City independent theatre companies creating bold new work, New Ohio began life as the Ohio Theatre in 1993 and initially operated in a warehouse in SoHo. In 2011, the company moved into their space on Christopher Street in the West Village and became the New Ohio Theatre, renovating and improving the 74-seat space while giving a home to 100-plus experimental new works by emerging artists.

Kind of work they did: New Ohio hosted productions from terraNOVA Collective, Page 73, The NeoFuturists, the Assembly, Vampire Cowboys, Bedlam, Untitled Theater Company No. 61, Blessed Unrest and many more. Annual programs included the Ice Factory Festival, Now In Process and The Archive Residency (co-run by IRT Theatre).

Reason for closure: Artistic director Robert Lyons cited increasing financial pressures in closing the New Ohio as of August 2023. Lyons also felt it was a good time to hand off artistic control to a new generation of artists. Alongside the closure announcement in February, the building's landlord began accepting proposals for a new company to take up residency; no further update has yet followed.
Columbia, Md., 1993-2023
Rep Stage

Who they were: In residence at Howard Community College, Rep Stage received funding from the Howard Arts Council, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the county and state governments, in addition to individual donors.

Kind of work they did: Rep Stage produced both classic and contemporary plays and musicals for audiences in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area. Their farewell production, William Finn and James Lapine's musical Falsettos, closed in May. "Today I choose to focus on gratitude and celebrate the work of the incredible artists who trusted me, journeyed with me, played with me, laughed with me, cried with me, took risks for me, and celebrated the power of theatre," artistic director Joseph W. Ritsch wrote on Facebook on his last day at Rep Stage.

Reason for closure: Rep Stage announced last November that Howard Community College would be shutting down the theatre at the end of the academic year. DC Theater Arts said that the decision "will allow the college to refocus funding to programs and services that directly serve students." However, many students in the college's Dance, Theatre, & Audio Video Production department worked on Rep Stage shows.
San Francisco/Oakland, 2007-2022
PianoFight

Who they were: PianoFight was a community-driven independent arts venue which partnered with local artists to present a wide variety of work in two intimate theatres, while also offering food and cocktails. The company hosted 1,500 performances for over 50,000 audience members in a given year. During the day, its spaces were used as offices and classrooms for community nonprofits. PianoFight had one space on Taylor Street, in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, and a second in downtown Oakland.

Kind of work they did: PianoFight welcomed music, comedy, dance, drag, film screenings, magic, variety shows and more-as described in the San Francisco Chronicle, its two spaces hosted "everything from a taping of a podcast about menstrual periods, a dating show aimed at disrupting dating apps, and the San Francisco Neo-Futurists ' whirlwind 30 plays in 60 minutes."

Reason for closure: PianoFight reopened both of its spaces in February 2022, but struggled with low ticket and bar sales. When the company learned it would be getting less money than expected from the California Venues Grant Program, the decision was made to close up shop.
Chicago, 2005-2020
The Right Brain Project

Who they were: Many of the troupe's performances took place at RBP Rorschach, an intimate space tucked away in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood that sat around 20 audience members for each performance.

Kind of work they did: Named the Chicago Reader's "best Off-Loop theatre company" in 2013, the RBP strove to present "startlingly intimate, proudly raw, and innately political" works that reflected the passions of both the company's artists and Chicago audiences. Production highlights include the Midwest premiere of Virgilio Piñera's Electra Garrigó, Oscar Wilde's Salome, Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade, a Euripides adaptation in The Bacchae Revisited, and the world premieres of Terry Boyle's Lured: The Curse of Swans and Michaela Heidemann's Odessa.

Reason for closure: The Right Brain Project announced its permanent closure in September 2020, stating that "subsisting as a small nonprofit theatre has never been easy," but the new challenges presented during the pandemic gave the theatre "a challenge outside of the RBP's current capacity." The statement goes on to say that the company was seeing this as an opportunity "to forge new creative families."
San Diego, 1976-2022
San Diego REP

Who they were: Founded in 1976 by Sam Woodhouse and D.W. Jacobs, San Diego REP grew out of the street theatre company Indian Magique. The Rep's mission has been to produce intimate, provocative, and inclusive theatre and to promote an interconnected community through progressive political and social values. The company first made its home at Sixth Avenue Playhouse, a space inside a church in downtown San Diego, before moving to a larger venue, the Lyceum, which the city had planned to tear down. The Rep's success in drawing audiences convinced the city to instead upgrade and expand the theater, reopening it in 1986 with a 500-seat mainstage and a smaller flexible space.

Kind of work they did: The REP produced or hosted over 500 events at the Lyceum each year. New plays, reimagined classics and experimental work filled their seasons, along with numerous festivals including the Latinx New Play Festival, Black Voices Reading Series, and Kuumba Fest, a festival of African and African American performance. The REP received a 1998 Tony nomination for It Ain't Nothin' But the Blues. Other notable productions include the West Coast premieres of American Buffalo and K2. Whoopi Goldberg was a regular on the Rep stage in its early years, and returned in 1993 for a two-night benefit.

Reason for closure: In June 2022, the Rep canceled all remaining productions for the year and laid off all staff, citing low ticket sales, costs associated with recent flooding, operating amidst an active construction zone, and the loss of major donors. The Lyceum Theatre is owned by the city and continues to host other events. "Our goal is to bring the REP back stronger, to continue making provocative, progressive theatre, and we're working toward this future," artistic director Woodhouse, who had retired in February, said in a statement.
Chicago, 2008-2023
Sideshow Theatre

Who they were: A non-Equity theatre company that operated out of rental spaces, Sideshow staged plays in Chicago's more intimate spaces with diverse ensembles. They featured an in-house commissioning/new-play development program called The Freshness Initiative and annually hosted the Chicago League of Lady Arm Wrestlers.

Kind of work they did: Their site emphasizes a passion for"theatre for the curious," an alchemy of new plays, adaptations, and stories "to mine the collective unconscious of the world."

Reason for closure: Their farewell messages cited several contributing factors: a canceled 2022 gala, departure from their longtime home at Victory Gardens, and the naturally diverging lives of company members.
Baltimore, 2007-2023
Single Carrot Theatre

Who they were: Founded by a group of theatre artists from Colorado who planted roots in Baltimore, the company expanded and moved from the city's arts district of Station North to Waverly, where they were in residence at the church Saint John's in the Village. Their budget was approximately $571,000 as of 2021.

Kind of work they did: Single Carrot was known for immersive works and collaborations with international artists and companies, including Belarus Free Theatre. In 2017, they produced the celebrated original work Promenade: Baltimore in a collaboration with Stereo AKT of Budapest. The show took audience members on a bus journey through city streets as actors performed on sidewalks. In 2021, the pandemic took the company outside again in Keep Off the Grass: A Guide to [Something] on the grounds of Saint John's.

Reason for closure: In their January announcement of closure, Single Carrot cited multiple contributing factors, including the planned departures of artistic director and founding company member Genevieve de Mahy and executive director Emily Cory. The theatre has also struggled with "staffing shortages and stretched human capacity" since the onset of COVID and wrote on their website that they "could not offer fair compensation to bring in artists and staff members and keep them." Prior to announcing their closure, Single Carrot also postponed a production of Aziza Barnes's play BLKS, due to potential mistreatment of Black members of the cast and artistic team. "Single Carrot's inadequate communication resulted in the direct harm to Black artists, which is antithetical to our mission and values," the company wrote in a December email. The company recently published a 42-page impact report on its work and legacy, which states that the theatre staged 33 world premieres and commissioned 24 works over its 15 years.
New York City/Saratoga Springs, N.Y., 1992-2022
The SITI Company

Who they were: A troupe of like-minded artists who came together around the theatre teaching of Tadashi Suzuki and the Viewpoints-influenced work of director Anne Bogart, SITI Company was known both for its rigorous physical training and for a body of experimental, ensemble-driven stage work. Among other venues, they performed frequently at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Wexner Center for the Arts, and Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Kind of work they did: With playwrights like Charles Mee Jr., as well as in ensemble-created works, adaptations of classics, and collaborations with dance and opera companies, SITI forged a unique presentational aesthetic influenced equally by the physical forms of Suzuki and the spatial/improvisational spirit of Viewpoints. Major works included bobrauschenbergamerica (with Chuck Mee), Steel Hammer (with composer Julia Wolfe), Death and the Ploughman, and Room (inspired by Virginia Woolf).

Reason for closure: SITI considered ways to continue and/or merge with other companies, but ultimately decided to cap their 30 years as a company with a final celebration and production. A complete archive of their work is available at the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University.
New Orleans, 1986-2022
Southern Rep

Who they were: Originally located in Canal Place, a multilevel shopping center at the foot of Canal Street, the company later took up residence at Loyola University New Orleans, and then, in 2019, moved into a permanent home inside the former St. Rose de Lima church in the historically Black neighborhood of Treme.

What kind of work they did: Seeking to present a selection of new works and classics that spoke to the New Orleans community, they did their share of Tennessee Williams, of course, but also a mix of new and old plays, including works by Taylor Mac, Sarah DeLappe, and Ntozake Shange.

Reason for closure: In the move to Treme, the company lost a certain portion of its long-standing white audience, then failed in their efforts to build relationships with the Black community, with some employees speaking publicly about racialized trauma in the transition. A silver lining: The former St. Rose de Lima Church has since reopened as the André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts & Cultural Justice (ACC New Orleans), a Black-led, BIPOC community-serving, multi-tenant, performance art and cultural justice venue.
New York City, 2006-2021
St. Luke's Theatre

Who they were: Saint Luke's Lutheran Church on 46th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues, in the heart of Hell's Kitchen, includes an intimate 175-seat theatre in its basement. Beginning in 2006 it was run by producer Edmund Gaynes, who dubbed the space St. Luke's Theatre. Gaynes programmed a wide array of simply staged crowd pleasers which performed in repertory.

Reason for closure: Gaynes announced St. Luke's closure in January of 2021, blaming the city's "forced lockdown" and saying the theatre had been shuttered "by government fiat." The church staff then sought new leadership to reinvent the space, and it reopened as Playhouse 46 at St. Luke's in April 2022 under the leadership of producer Jennifer Pluff with the new musical Islander.
Utah/Wyoming/New York City, 1984-2022
Sundance Theatre Program

Who they were: When Robert Redford's film and media company took over the Utah Playwriting Conference, founded in 1980, it was renamed Sundacne Playwrights Lab. Led by David Kranes, it offered intensive script development for writers, who were invited to participate based on the recommendations of theatres. In 1997, Kranes stepped down and it was renamed the Theatre Lab, a sign of an expanded focus on all kinds of theatre (musicals, dance-theatre, performance art, etc.). Philip Himberg was named the producing director of the overall Theatre Program. A few years later, an invitation-only playwrights retreat began at the UCross Foundation in Wyoming, and the Lab itself sprang free from Utah, with iterations in New York City, Massachusetts, East Africa, and Morocco.

What kind of work they did: Among the works shepherded through Sundance's unique development process were the musicals Passing Strange, Spring Awakening, The Light in the Piazza, Fun Home, and A Strange Loop,and the plays The Laramie Project, I Am My Own Wife, Yellowman, Dogeaters, Skeleton Crew, and Indecent.

Reason for closure: When Himberg stepped down in 2019, his colleague Christopher Hibma took over, and the Lab went virtual in 2020. Then Sundance announced "a break" to contemplate a "hybrid" model that would combine the Sundance Film Music Program and the Film's New Frontiers Program with the vestiges of the Theatre Program. According to Himberg, that proposal was shelved in May 2022, and the entire theatre program with it.
Seattle, 2013-2022
Theatre22

Who they were: Founded by Corey McDaniel, who also served as the company's producing artistic director, the company had a budget of approximately $80,300 as of 2021. From 2015 until the 2020 shutdown, Theatre22 staged their productions at 12th Avenue Arts.

Kind of work they did: Theatre22 produced a variety of contemporary works, including many by local Seattle playwrights like Wayne Rawley. At the time of their closing, the theatre had produced 16 mainstage shows. Their last production was the play Nonsense and Beauty by Scott C. Sickles, directed by McDaniel.

Reason for closure: Theatre22 announced their closure last August. They had only staged two indoor shows since the onset of COVID before facing the realization that they could not remain at their venue. According to the Seattle Times, Theatre22 signed a contract to rent space from a Seattle Public Theater (SPT) venue to produce two shows. McDaniel told the Times 's Dusty Somers that he did not do his "due diligence" to ensure that Theatre22 would be able to work with SPT after 2022, leaving the company to scramble for a potential new venue or fold.
Greensboro, N.C., 2002-2023
Triad Stage

Who they were: Triad Stage was founded in 2002 to bring live, professional theatre to a rejuvenated downtown Greensboro, the third most populous city in North Carolina. Co-founders Preston Lane and Richard Whittington purchased a vacant building and transformed it into a theatre center with a 300-seat live performance space (an 80-seat cabaret space was added in 2008).

Kind of work they did: Triad presented revivals and classics alongside occasional new works. Some new plays were by Southern writers, like Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder's White Lightning, while others came to Triad following New York success, such as Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities. Triad planned 2023-24 season was to include the world premiere of Jekyll by Patricia Lynn; Every Christmas Story Ever Told (And Then Some) by Michael Carleton, James FitzGerald, and John K. Alvarez; Chicken and Biscuits by Douglas Lyons; and Coal Country by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen.

Reason for closure: When theatres closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Triad was already carrying an accumulated deficit of $1.5 million. During the shutdown, the theatre faced a reckoning around allegations of a toxic culture and seasons dominated by white artists, and Lane stepped down as artistic director in November 2020 after facing accusations of sexual misconduct. Triad shifted its artistic focus to include newer productions and more diverse storytelling, as well as a reduced operating budget, but was still unable to sustain operations following poor ticket sales.
Albuquerque, N.M., 1993-2020
Tricklock

Who they were: Tricklock Company devised genre-mashing new works that combined shadow puppetry, song, and physical story creation to explore "the harsher side of humanity." Alongside strong connections with its own community, Tricklock also placed particular focus on international outreach, with members teaching and performing in Uganda, Serbia, Scotland, Poland, Israel, and Colombia.

Kind of work they did: The company's breakthrough production was a new devised version of The Seagull, directed by Leonardo Shapiro of New York's Shaliko Company, which toured across the country 1996-97. Beginning in 2001, Tricklock presented the annual Revolutions International Theatre Festival, a 3-week gathering of experimental theatremakers from across the world. Tricklock created many original works, including The Glorious and Bloodthirsty Billy the Kid, the Greatest Serial Killer of Our Time, which toured from 2004-07.

Reason for closure: The COVID-19 shutdown began just as Tricklock's 2020 Revolutions Festival had opened, creating a financial strain as Tricklock paid out most expenses for the festival but saw little income. Tricklock closed in August of 2020. Founding member and executive director Juli Hendren went on to found Revo Inc., a nonprofit providing opportunities for people to explore global citizenship through the performing arts. Revo presented the 21st Revolutions Festival in 2021, with two live events alongside mostly online programming.
New York City, 2005-2023
Under the Radar Festival

Who they were: An annual theatre festival spotlighting experimental artists ranging from emerging talents to masters in the field. Started by Mark Russell, the festival initially premiered at St. Ann's Warehouse with a focus on U.S. theatre companies, then moved to the Public Theater, where it branched out into the international community and expanded in duration from five days to two weeks.

Kind of work they did: UTR was known for presenting independent, experimental, contemporary works. Over the years UTR featured work by 229 companies from 42 countries, including Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Gob Squad, Belarus Free Theatre, 600 Highwaymen, Guillermo Calderón, and Young Jean Lee. Under the Radar also held annual professional symposiums featuring panels and conversations related to festival programming. The Public was the festival's producer, but served as the presenter, not the producer, of individual shows, whose creators raised money to cover most of their costs. Many international shows were sponsored by their home countries. UTR had an annual budget of about $1 million, excluding salaries and operating costs.

Reason for closure: The Public Theater announced it had placed the festival on "extended hiatus" in June 2023, citing financial pressures, with no promise when or if the festival might continue. Russell's employment at the theatre was terminated. According to , the Public chose to sacrifice UTR while retaining in-house programs like the Mobile Unit and Public Works because UTR was not a creative or originating program of the theatre.
Washington, D.C., 2013-2023
Unexpected Stage Company

Who they were: Founded in 2013 by Rachel Stroud-Goodrich and Christopher Goodrich, who are also married, the company chiefly operated out of River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Bethesda, with a mission to "explore the intricacies of the human experience by delving into the unnoticed and unexplored corners of interpersonal relationships, and providing a theatrical home for underrepresented voices."

Kind of work they did: Unexpected's final production was Fade by Tanya Saracho. The company previously staged Sophisticated New Ones, a play by Keith Powell ( 30 Rock), 8 Stops by Deb Margolin, and The Few by Samuel D. Hunter.

Reason for closure: Unexpected's statement cited multiple reasons for closure: audience reticence to return to live shows amid the ongoing presence of COVID-19, the company's married artistic directors craving more time with their three daughters, and financial strain due to rising costs.

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Theatre in Crisis: What We're Losing, and What Comes Next

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A look at this extraordinary moment of contraction for the U.S. theatre field, including a complete list of closures since March 2020.

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What Is Inheritance Tax?

An inheritance tax is a tax imposed by some states on the recipients of inherited assets. In contrast to an estate tax, an inheritance tax is paid by the recipient of a bequest rather than the estate of the deceased.

The inheritance tax is not common in the U.S. In fact, just six states have an inheritance tax as of 2023, and the taxation depends on the state in which the deceased lived or owned property, the value of the inheritance, and the beneficiary's relationship to the decedent. Taxes for 2022 are paid in 2023.

Key Takeaways

Understanding Inheritance Taxes

An inheritance tax is not the same as an estate tax. An estate tax is assessed on the estate itself before its assets are distributed, while an inheritance tax may be imposed on the bequest's beneficiaries.

There is no federal inheritance tax in the U.S. While the U.S. government taxes large estates directly -imposing estate taxes and, if relevant, income tax on any earnings from the estate-it does not impose an inheritance tax on those who receive assets from an estate.

Inheritance taxes are collected by six U.S. states: Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Whether your inheritance will be taxed, and at what rate, depends on its value, your relationship to the person who passed away, and the prevailing rules where you live.

Inheritance tax may be assessed by the state or states where the decedent lived or owned property.

How Inheritance Taxes Are Calculated

An inheritance tax, if due, is applied only to the portion of an inheritance that exceeds an exemption amount. Above those thresholds, tax is usually assessed on a sliding basis. Rates typically begin in the single digits and rise to between 15% and 18%. Both the exemption you receive and the rate you're charged may vary with your relationship to the deceased-more so than with the value of assets you are inheriting.

As a rule, the closer your familial relationship to the deceased, the higher the exemption and the lower the rate you'll pay. Surviving spouses are exempt from inheritance tax in all six states. Domestic partners, too, are exempt in New Jersey. Descendants are only subject to an inheritance tax in Nebraska and Pennsylvania.

Inheritance Tax Thresholds

In most states, an inheritance tax applies to bequests above a certain amount. In a few instances, the size of the estate is significant. For example:

In Iowa, if the estate is valued at less than $25,000 then no tax is due when property passes to the recipients.

In Maryland, inheritances from estates smaller than $50,000 are also exempt.

There are further exemptions for heirs, depending on how closely related they were to the deceased. Here are the details by state:

Iowa: Spouses, lineal ascendants (parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents), and lineal descendants (children, stepchildren, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren) are exempt; charities exempt up to $500. The tax rate on others ranges from 3% to 9% of inheritance in 2022.

Kentucky: Immediate family members (spouses, parents, children, siblings) are exempt; other recipients exempt up to $500 or $1,000. The tax is on a sliding scale based on the size of inheritance and includes a minimum amount, plus a percentage ranging from 4% to 16%.

Maryland: Immediate family (parents, grandparents, spouses, children, grandchildren, siblings) and charities exempt; other recipients exempt up to $1,000. The tax rate is 10%.

Nebraska: Spouses and charities fully exempt; immediate family (parents, grandparents, siblings, children, grandchildren) exempt up to $40,000 (rising to $100,000 in 2023). Other relatives are exempt up to $15,000 ($40,000 in 2023) and unrelated heirs up to $10,000 ($25,000 in 2023). Prior to 2023, the tax rates above those exemptions are 1%, 13%, and 18%, respectively. Starting in 2023, those rates rise to 1%, 11%, and 15%, respectively.

New Jersey: Immediate family (spouse, children, parents, grandparents, grandchildren) and charitable organizations exempt. Siblings and sons/daughters-in-law exempt up to $25,000. The tax rate ranges from 11% to 16%, depending on the size of inheritance and the familial relationship.

Pennsylvania: Spouse and minor children exempt. Adult children, grandparents, and parents are exempt up to $3,500. The tax rate is 4.5%, 12%, or 15%, depending on the relationship.

Inheritance Tax vs. Estate Tax

Inheritance taxes and estate taxes are often lumped together. However, they are two distinct forms of taxation.

Both levies are based on the fair market value of a deceased person's property, usually as of the date of death. But an estate tax is levied on the value of the decedent's estate, and the estate pays it. In contrast, an inheritance tax is levied on the value of an inheritance received by the beneficiary, and it is the beneficiary who pays it.

The distinction between an estate tax and an inheritance tax with identical rates and exemptions might make no difference to a sole heir. But in some rare situations, an inheritance could be subject to both estate and inheritance taxes.

According to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), federal estate tax returns are only required for estates with values exceeding $12.06 million in 2022 (rising to $12.92 million in 2023). If the estate passes to the spouse of the deceased person, no estate tax is assessed. Taxes for 2022 are paid in 2023.

If a person inherits an estate large enough to trigger the federal estate tax, the decedent lived or owned property in a state with an inheritance tax, and the bequest is not fully exempt under that state's law, the beneficiary faces the federal estate tax as well as a state inheritance tax. The estate is taxed before it is distributed, and the inheritance is then taxed at the state level.

Heirs may also face a state estate tax. As of 2023, 12 states and one district still collected estate taxes: Connecticut, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.

If you live in a state with an estate tax, you're more likely to feel its pinch than you are to pay federal estate tax. The exemptions for state and district estate taxes are all less than half those of the federal assessment. Some state estate tax exemptions may be as low as $1 million.

Avoiding Inheritance Tax

While there are a lot of exceptions and exemptions for inheritance taxes, especially for spouses and children, residents with significant assets in a state with one may still want to minimize the exposure for heirs.

One common strategy is to buy a life insurance policy in the sum you wish to bequeath and make the person you want to leave it to the beneficiary of the policy. The death benefit from an insurance policy is not subject to inheritance taxes.

You could also put assets in a trust-preferably an irrevocable trust. This effectively removes them from your estate and their classification as an inheritance upon your death. You can set up a schedule for the distribution of the funds when you establish the trust.

How Much Can You Inherit Without Paying Taxes?

The six U.S. states with inheritance taxes provide varying exemptions based on the size of the inheritance and the familial relationship of the heir to the deceased. The federal estate tax exemption shields $12.06 million from tax as of 2022 (rising to $12.92 million in 2023). There's no income tax on inheritances.

What Is the Federal Inheritance Tax Rate?

There is no federal inheritance tax-that is, a tax on the sum of assets an individual receives from a deceased person. However, a federal estate tax applies to estates larger than $12.06 million for 2022 (rising to $12.92 million in 2023). The tax is assessed only on the portion of an estate that exceeds those amounts. The rate is on a sliding scale, from 18% to 40%.

Do Beneficiaries Have to Pay Taxes on Inheritance?

It depends on their familial relationship to the deceased and on the state where the decedent lived or owned property. Only estates or property located in one of six states that impose inheritance taxes may be subject to them.

Surviving spouses are always exempt from inheritance taxes. Other immediate relatives, like the deceased's parents, children, and siblings, are exempt to varying degrees, depending on the state. They may be entitled to inherit a certain sum tax-free and to pay a lower tax rate on the remainder.

Inheritance taxes mainly affect more distant relatives and unrelated heirs.

How Is Inheritance Tax Calculated?

Inheritance tax rules vary by state. Most states divide beneficiaries into different classes, depending on their family relationship to the deceased (immediate, lineal, unrelated), and set exemptions and tax rates based on those categories.

Most states only apply tax to an inheritance above a certain amount. They then charge a percentage of this sum; it may be flat or it may be graduated. Kentucky, for example, imposes a rate that ranges from 4% to 16%, rising as the inheritance amount does, from $1,000 to over $200,000. It also imposes a flat dollar figure, ranging from $30 to $28,670, based on the sum inherited.

The Bottom Line

Inheritance taxes only affect residents in six states. And they mainly apply to distant relatives or those completely unrelated to the deceased. Spouses are always exempted, and immediate family members-children, parents-often are as well. Siblings, grandchildren, and grandparents, if they're taxed at all, receive more generous terms (larger exemptions, lower rates).

Still, inheritance taxes can kick in at relatively small inheritance amounts-sometimes as little as $500. Those considering bequests that could be subject to an inheritance tax might consider estate-planning strategies including gifts, insurance policies and irrevocable trusts.

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Inheritance Tax: What It Is, How It's Calculated, and Who Pays It

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Inheritance tax is a tax imposed on those who inherit assets from an estate. Discover who pays inheritance taxes and how much you might owe.

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As theatres have reemerged from pandemic closure in the past season, and audiences are returning, though in still lower numbers than before, there's plenty of drama onstage. But behind the scenes there's another drama that's been unfolding: a quiet strangulation that only theatre insiders know about, which has affected everything from the expense of building sets to rehearsal scheduling, and perhaps most significantly what titles are being chosen for the 2023-24 season.

Put simply, it has become extremely difficult for theatres to find enough competent craftspeople, even to recruit untrained laborers who can hammer sets, paint flats, or sew costumes for professional regional theatres-least of all folks experienced in the sub-specialty of theatre work. Similarly, it has become much harder to find designers who are not overloaded.

"It's every theatre that I talk to throughout the country and through TCG," said William Hayes, producing artistic director at Palm Beach Dramaworks in Florida. "There are Zoom sessions with management throughout the country, and theatres are terrified. Because you can have all the money in the world, but when nobody's left in the industry, that is not going to help you."

This labor crunch has become a protracted crisis, said Patrick Fitzwater, artistic director and co-founder of the acclaimed Slow Burn Theater Company in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. His company, noted for its extensive sets and costumes for musicals, opened its own scene shop about a year ago, realizing its long-held dream of completely producing its own scenery of its own designs. But now, Fitzwater said, "I can't staff it. It's just sitting there. It has a brand new CNC (computer-controlled cutting) machine in there that nobody can operate. It's a two-year lease, and we're not using it at all. It's a glorified storage space. It came down to the fact you could have all tools, but you had to have the labor and skills."

As an example, he said the entire set of Slow Burn's Little Shop of Horrors last October "was supposed to turn around, but there were no scenic people to really oversee that. So you ended up with a 5,000-pound house onstage that couldn't function." And the theatre's two-level set for Footloose, built by whatever workers they could find to do it, seemed so unsteady that its second tier was scrapped during 11th-hour rehearsals and the show reblocked the night before opening last December.

Reluctantly, Slow Burn sent its design for the upcoming Newsies to a New York firm to build-swallowing a huge increase in cost, let alone the risk that it may not be shipped on time.

The burden may sound prosaic to civilians, but not for those on the other side of the footlights. From Seattle to Chicago, Milwaukee to Philadelphia, Miami-Dade County to Palm Beach County, artistic directors, designers, and artisans in professional regional theatres I interviewed all seemed to reading from the same script.

At Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, director of production Tom Pearl detailed the challenge: "Jobs that used to take us three phone calls or emails to fill, now we will find we offer a position to 12 people before we find one person to take it."

Alongside the staffing problem, the creation of sets and costumes is affected by other economic pressures: a sharp increase in the cost of materials due to inflation, compounded by the unreliability of the supply chain, and the drop in income from subscriptions.

These pressures can't help but affect what audiences see onstage. "There are clear marching orders from theatres for simpler, less complex, and less staff-demanding designs," said Jordon Armstrong, managing director for MNM Theatre Company in Palm Beach County, who also runs the company's scene shop. "There's a lot more lean into abstraction and theatrical convention as opposed to kitchen realism."

At the 35-year-old tentpole Actors' Playhouse in Coral Gables, artistic director David Arisco said, "We can't do what we used to do. Those discussions happen every day. The sets have to be more minimalistic. The sets have to be more suggestive. The sets need to be less glorious."

In the winter of 2020, many regional theatres employed a technical director and had a handful of full-time crew members for sets and costumes. But they also crucially relied on a variable number of experienced gig workers without benefits who might put in four to six weeks, then be left to their own devices for a month or two, then back for another three to six weeks.

When COVID slammed the production door that spring, not only were those gig workers let go, but so were most of the tech workers, including supervisors and managers.

The unexpected slamming on the brakes was traumatic for veterans like Jodi Dellaventura, best known as the go-to prop mistress in South Florida, who also could be found hammering flats, painting canvas, and designing scenery.

"Even though you have a solid job, it was taken away and you have no control," Dellaventura said. "There was nothing like it. I didn't work for two years."

Some companies made an effort to retain staff. Milwaukee Rep laid off 10 to 20 percent of its staff, in contrast to many theatres, who instantly fired 60 to 90 percent. The Rep sought grants from philanthropists to keep their pay reliable.

"We repurposed their skill set," said the Rep's executive director, Chad Bauman. "They were building PPE for our hospitals. We knew that if we didn't keep them employed, they would not only leave our theatre, they would leave the field, and then when we tried to reopen, we wouldn't be able to reopen."

Elsewhere, though, the exodus was devastating: carpenters, painters, welders, electricians, designers, seamstresses, technical directors.

"They weren't going to sit around and be like, 'Well, theatre will come back one day,'" said Matt Stabile, producing artistic director of Theatre Lab, the resident professional company at Florida Atlantic University, which specializes in new work. "They started to go and find that the skills that they were using in theatre could easily be applied to other areas."

Indeed, those skills were highly marketable in a dozen areas: television, theme parks, corporate events, events, cruise ships, Vegas shows, even multi-million-dollar weddings. Carpenters just could build cabinets. For the most skilled, companies serving those other customers snatched up the artisans with higher pay and benefits.

"People who are either welders or carpenters, they're working in shops now, making 30, 50, whatever, dollars an hour working and building stuff," Dellaventura said.

As Actors' Playhouse's Arisco put it, crafts people "realized, Why am I working six jobs to work in the theatre and make this much money when I could just do this" one full-time job? "It's not like they don't have a passion for wanting to work in the arts-they do, they love what they do. But they also have bigger issues with paying their bills or juggling many jobs instead of having one that finally came through with benefits or finally came through with a decent pay rate."

Stabile went further: "Frankly, it's not shocking that some of those people would choose to not return to an industry that was kind of, 'The show must go on and the play is the thing'-all these phrases we like to make ourselves feel better. But ultimately, it's people putting that product together, and it can become exhausting to be like, 'I'm going to put in 60 hours just to get the show up and running.'"

Many went back to school to finish degrees or add a new one. Many retrained in other professions. Some learned advanced computer skills. As the months of COVID turned into years, Bauman said, "Even in the performing arts, opera opened before we did...Theatres were the last to reopen. The longer we remain closed, the more instability began to creep in in terms of employment."

When COVID figures began to dip, producers and artistic directors began trying out limited productions and planning a return to full seasons.

The problem: The workers were gone.

Even in a theatre town like Chicago, where some smaller companies have folded or remain in limbo, the number of people willing to work in theatre has shrunk, said Steppenwolf's Pearl.

When scenic designer Sean McClelland designed Cinderella at the Wick Theatre in Boca Raton, he said the dearth of scenic painters led the company to reach out to 30 scenic painters in New York City-with no luck. Finally, Kimberly Wick, the theatre's associate producer, found a painter who could "drive over at 9 o'clock at night from the west coast of Florida. She stayed in a hotel. She painted for three days. Then she went back. Then she came the following weekend, painted for three days, and then she went back, and I finished it." Indeed, Wick said, she herself painted "half of the set for Cinderella." After doing the same for their production of Damn Yankees, though, she said, "I took my paint clothes and threw them in a ball and threw them out. I said, 'I am not painting another set. I am 60 years old, and I can't do it anymore.' "

Similarly, at Slow Burn, Fitzwater and his managing director, Matthew Korinko, found themselves with paint brushes in hand.

"It's like all the theatres are pulling out the same three (scenic artists) that are still available," said McClelland, owner of Symbiont Scenic in Santa Fe, N.M.

The number of people actually designing and building sets and costumes seems to have dwindled everywhere. Actors' Playhouse, for instance, once had six to seven regularly employed staff in the scenic shop; now it's three or four. The costume shop's staff of four is down to one.

Indeed, with supervisory technical directors having to step in to do everything from design to engineering to hammering nails, their disappearance is no surprise to McClelland. "The TDs are so burned out," he said. "Who wants to work for $40,000 a year, be in charge of building all the shows, the building's maintenance, everything on top of it? Now theatres can't even fill the top position, which is ridiculous."

McClelland is still doing some of the corporate work that got him through the pandemic, but this past season he had six assignments from theatres, and he has others on the table. He's glad for the work, but the glut of demand reminds him that many of his designing colleagues have simply left the business because they were burned out.

For his part, Rick Pena, a founding member of Slow Burn Theater and its long-time costume chief, spent the pandemic designing costumes at a wealthy private school in Broward County with an active theatre department. The only reason he returned to Slow Burn, he said, is that they offered him a salary position with benefits, "which is unheard of. I can probably count, not even on my hand, how many costume designers have that in South Florida."

The short-term workarounds for this ongoing crisis have been simple but deeply problematic: renting sets and costumes, or hiring an outside company to do the work at an even higher cost, or hiring inexperienced hands. The lack of experience among the most eager newbies can be a big issue in the specialized art of theatrical scenery and costumes.

MNM Theatre Company's scene shop, meanwhile, has stayed open by designing and/or building and/or installing sets for about 20 productions total in the past season, often for other companies in the region, with just two full-time carpenters.

"The one downside of theatre carpentry is, you can't just get a contractor come in and build stuff," MNM's Armstrong said. "I mean, they could do it, but it's going to be overly expensive and overly heavy, because they're used to building houses and walls and support structures as opposed to facades. We make a bunch of boxes and tell the audience they're not boxes. It's all smoke and mirrors. There's architecture in it, but it's architecture built out of Popsicle sticks and sheer will."

The fallback cited over and over is hiring outside companies. But the cost of farming it out is considerable, said Morgan Green, lead artistic director for the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. "It's one of the most expensive things-easily five times more expensive than any other component of the production," she said.

A few years ago, an outside company might charge $8,000 to produce a set; now it can be as much as $35,000 to $45,000, McClelland said.

Of course, theatres are striving to keep loyal audiences from noticing any significant change in quality, or even scope. Some companies felt that audience's past expectations for impressive sets and costuming forced them to dig even deeper when they initially reopened, as if to say, a la Sondheim, "We're still here."

Milwaukee Rep, for instance, reopened last fall with a 33-actor version of Titanic, buoyed by the fact that they had kept much of their staff intact. "Our thought process was, we wanted to give somebody a reason to get off their couch and away from Netflix," Bauman said.

Exacerbating these challenges is the rising costs in materials these days-when you can get them.

"We are seeing sometimes a 30 to 50 percent increase in the price of materials," said John Langs, artistic director at ACT in Seattle.

Steel, hammers, screwdrivers, even the casters to roll on scenery have doubled in cost. While the inflationary spikes have subsided a bit in recent months, bills for the crucial element of lumber tripled earlier in the comeback, Stabile said.

Price tags have also doubled for items most non-theatre folks wouldn't even think about, like 3M adhesive spray and spray paint, Wick said. Agonizing decisions have to be made on spreadsheets. As Armstrong put it, "It's always the fine line of, is it going to cost more with a man-hour labor to fix it up, or is it worth getting new?"

So even if you can find the workers you need, you may not have the materials in hand for them to work with.

"That goes to everything," said Steppenwolf's Pearl. "In the beginning, it was plywood, manufactured goods. The scene shop now has to keep hardware on hand. Say our costume shop needs a red slip. We used to go to two or three shops; now we have to go to seven or eight. We have had to pivot in our expectations, because Amazon and overnight delivery is not always reliable."

Planning ahead is no assurance. Said ACT's Langs, "Even when we think we're months ahead, we just sit there biting our nails, going, 'Is it going to get here on time so that we have time to do the excellent work that we know how to do?' "

Companies have been experimenting with and weighing a dozen solutions, some temporary, some permanent. Some, like Palm Beach Dramaworks, are choosing one or two titles with elaborate sets for their 2023-24 season, interspersed with shows that require only minimal scenery.

And some theatres are looking to integrate design parameters within their season. At the Wilma, designer Matt Saunders, Green said, "chose some standard sizes for the platforms and for the walls, so that we didn't have to have them custom built" for each show. "We could use existing flats and platforms and just paint them a different color."

Similarly, Langs said, ACT and "other theatres are treating designs like we would if we were running repertory theatres, employing a single designer to do a repertory plot for the season to save on the labor that it takes to do a full strike and rehang and focus. We're looking at saying, 'Here's the whole pie of the year, and here are the seven stories that we're going to tell within this that have to be told with these resources.'"

While most theatres once indiscriminately consigned nearly everything to the garbage pickup alley after strike, no more. The set for MNM Theatre's The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee "was entirely stock pieces that we repurposed, repainted, cleaned up. It's cheaper to clean up the dings and the staple holes on old pieces than it is to buy new materials," Armstrong said.

Saving scenery, props, costumes, and the like poses a new problem: Most companies have limited or no storage space, and renting warehouse space is an added expense for the budget.

Other solutions require adjustments to the budget as well. Theatres that have staggered work hours over shorter days find that it takes more overall days. "We made the build weeks longer, which costs more money," said Slow Burn's Fitzwater. "That way we could bring people in who weren't working their day jobs to come in from 6 to 10 at night to build rather than an eight-hour day."

Importing workers when the local hiring pool is thin is one solution, but that requires housing and other amenities. Similarly, if a company is associated with a college drama department, students can be hired for pay or given an internship during the summer to begin work for the coming season. But the training and mentorship these student workers require is a further investment of labor on the part of already strained staff.

When preferred set and costume designers are overwhelmed, some theatres have resorted to borrowed designs and/or rented scenery. Even with its own sophisticated scene shop, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre rented the main drape for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum from Geva Theatre in Rochester. For its Oliver!, it bought drawings from the production at the Muny in St. Louis.

Hayes, whose Dramaworks also has its own scene and costume shops, has floated a provocative blue-sky proposal that would take cooperation to a more formal business level: What if three or four similarly sized theatres shared a central production center? They could jointly pay competitive salaries for experienced hands as well as provide plenty of full-time work, especially if theatres began their design processes a full year in advance. (Though government-supported and now closed, a similar paradigm combined with production spaces called the Arts Incubator operated for years in an old school building in Arlington, Va.)

One possible option in the future for theatrical design-one that few folks welcome-is the use of architectural artificial intelligence programs like Midjourney, which have been used "on paper" to create initial visual set design images.

"There's already college kids writing pieces on it and how they think it's going to replace all set designers in 10 years," McClelland said. "Some people have gotten pretty good at it. They'll be like, 'I want to do Wicked with an Andy Warhol sensibility,' and it just instantly pops up images of what that set would look like. There's already a lawsuit starting."

Of course, the obvious solution to a labor crunch and rampant burnout is to improve labor conditions. Most theatres have nixed the traditional 10-out-of-12 tech "hell weeks," for starters, and other theatres have instituted five-day work weeks.

"The theatre used to run on people's goodwill, and people would work endless hours and late into the night and make it happen," said the Wilma's Green. "That is no longer acceptable. That is not a healthy work environment." She said that the Wilma is "dedicated to this cultural shift where it's a good place to work, you are compensated fairly for your labor, you are treated well, and you feel safe when you come to work, etc." Of course, "That just means that it's more expensive, and that means that there's less money for other things. So we're putting more resources toward the people rather than the work, but then the work suffers. So we have to find a balance."

At Theatre Lab, Stabile said, "I hope that the outcome is that we're starting to value people more. We've been doing a lot of work at our theatre about what systems we can put in place to make sure that we're providing ample time to get projects finished, and that nobody has to pull an all-nighter."

Some theatre workers took the opportunity of the pandemic pause to rethink their commitment. For her part, prop mistress Dellaventura she opened a candle business and began meditation. As theatres have reopened, she's returned with a different attitude.

"I had been working until three, four in the morning," she recalled. "I was working on literally, like, six shows at the same time. I don't do that anymore...I don't work past midnight anymore, and I don't work on as many shows anymore. I do other things for myself now. I find that I'm much happier. I still love theatere and I love doing what I do and I still put forth my same energy. I'm just not doing as many things as I was now."

Looking ahead, most of the folks interviewed exuded that unique theatrical meld of hope and practicality, but offered few concrete predictions. "Theatres are always a survivor," McClelland said.

But what about theatre workers? Most theatre leaders have noticed a noticeable drop in the number of young people coming out of school who are willing to work onstage, backstage, or in the shops.

McClelland's hope is "that the next batch of college kids coming through are going to realize that there is a higher demand in this field," and that the pay is better than it was "five years ago, when you came out of college with a degree in tech or design and found a low-level internship somewhere. I hope they realize there is quite a demand, and the possibility of an actual career."
Bill Hirschman is founder and chief critic for Florida Theater On Stage, a for-profit arts journalism website for 12 years. A theatre critic and arts journalist for 25 years, he is a former chairman of the American Theatre Critics Association.

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